<title>3D interpolation for the digital restoration of 35-mm film</title>

Abstract

The celebration of the Centenary of Cinema in 1995 was the occasion to initiate new developments for the preservation of the international cinematic heritage and the restoration of old damaged films. 'Classical' film restoration is based on special printing machines to improve the quality of copies. Only a small class of artifacts can be removed with such a process because the unit of manipulation is always a whole image sequence. With the help of digital image processing techniques the restoration process can be adapted for each frame or even pixel. This creates new potentialities for the restoration of films beyond repair, especially nitrate based films produced before 1954 and early color films. This paper presents a short overview about a system for the digital restoration of image sequences, currently under development in the EUREKA project LIMELIGHT. After an introduction to the technical objectives and key figures, the restoration process is described for the case of 35mm film. Algorithms for the detection of artifacts, such as dust, image vibrations, scratches, distorted frames and brightness variations, based on a morphological detector, which uses spatial properties, and a dynamic detector, based on motion analysis, are presented. Furthermore an algorithm for 3D images interpolation used for the removal of scratches and subtitles is described. The main problem is the reconstruction of the missing image content for more than one frame in the same spatial location. Application examples for each defect class are given.© (1998) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.