Flicker Compensation for Archived Film Using a Spatially-Adaptive Nonlinear Model

Abstract

We present a novel approach for the compensation of temporal brightness variations (commonly referred to as flicker) in archived film sequences. The proposed method1is motivated by fundamental principles of photographic image registration and provides a substantial level of adaptation to temporal but also spatial variations of picture brightness. Additionally our scheme provides an efficient mechanism for the appointment and dynamic update of reference frames which makes it suitable for the compensation of long duration film sequences while it addresses problems arising from scene motion using a novel motion-compensated greylevel tracing approach. We present experimental evidence which suggests that our method offers high levels of performance and compares favourably with competing state-of-the-art techniques for flicker compensation.