On Restoration of Degraded Cinematic Sequences by Means of Digital Image Processing

Abstract

There are thousands of old black and white movies that are the cultural heritage of nations. These films are quite often seriously degraded. This is a problem of significant importance especially in Poland, where most of cinematic heritage was damaged during and after World War II. There is a wide spectrum of defects of different kinds and various complexity, which is a serious challenge for image processing scientists. In this paper a systematic methodology for solving these difficult problems is proposed. It contains an analysis of most common defects and introduces their taxonomy. The most important part of the work is devoted to the detection and removal of degradations. For this purpose different tools of image processing are applied, especially based on mathematical morphology. Considering the diversity and complexity of the defects one can easily observe that there is no uniform methodology that could be successfully applied to all degradation types. Unfortunately it does not seem to be possible to detect and remove all of them completely automatically. Therefore the whole system for semi-automatic treatment (with limited human interaction) is proposed.