Abstract
1960s film was typically printed on tri-acetate film base. If not preserved properly, such material breaks down at a chemical level, which is a non-stoppable process that permanently fuses the film so that it essentially becomes a lump of solid plastic. Recently, some precious films, such as the only known copy of the earliest surviving episode of ‘The Morecambe and Wise Show’ have been discovered, but they are in poor condition. They will eventually turn into a pool of sticky liquid and be gone forever. In this paper, as proof of concept, we use X-ray microtomography to provide 3D imaging of a test film of similar vintage, and propose an automatic method to extract footage from it.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Height H refers to the height of the frame which is in the film strip, and is therefore rotated 90\(^\circ \) to the normal viewing position.
References
Binder, M.: A Light Affliction: A History of Film Preservation and Restoration (2015). Lulu.com
Davis, G.R., Evershed, A.N.Z., Mills, D.: Quantitative high contrast X-ray microtomography for dental research. J. Dent. 41(5), 475–482 (2013)
Davis, G.R., Mills, D.: Brute force absorption contrast microtomography. In: Proceedings of SPIE: Developments in X-Ray Tomography IX, vol. 9212 (2014)
Macchia, A., et al.: Characterization and weathering of motion-picture films with support of cellulose nitrate, cellulose acetate and polyester. Procedia Chem. 8, 175–184 (2013)
Freeth, T., et al.: Decoding the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Nature 444, 587–591 (2006)
Enticknap, L., Restoration, F.: The Culture and Science of Audiovisual Heritage. Palgrave Macmillan, New York (2013)
Kokaram, A.C.: Motion Picture Restoration: Digital Algorithms for Artefact Suppression in Degraded Motion Picture Film and Video. Springer, London (2013)
Liu, C., Rosin, P.L., Lai, Y.-K., Hu, W.: Robust segmentation of historical parchment XMT images for virtual unrolling. In: Digital Heritage, pp. 11–18 (2015)
Mills, D., Curtis, A., Davis, G., Rosin, P.L., Lai, Y.-K.: Apocalypto: revealing the Bressingham roll. J. Pap. Conserv. 15(3), 14–19 (2014)
Samko, O., Lai, Y.-K., Marshall, D., Rosin, P.L.: Virtual unrolling and information recovery from scanned scrolled historical documents. Pattern Recogn. 47(1), 248–259 (2014)
Steger, C.: An unbiased detector of curvilinear structures. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 20(2), 113–125 (1998)
Acknowledgments
We thank Paul Vanezis (BBC) and Ulrich Reudel (BFI).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Liu, C., Rosin, P.L., Lai, YK., Davis, G.R., Mills, D., Norton, C. (2016). Recovering Historical Film Footage by Processing Microtomographic Images. In: Ioannides, M., et al. Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. EuroMed 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10058. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48496-9_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48496-9_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48495-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48496-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)