An improved motion-compensated restoration method for damaged color motion picture films

In this paper, we propose an improved motion-compensated restoration method for color motion picture films deteriorated due to flashing blotches. The method consists of an improved multiresolution block matching with log-D search, a rank ordered differences-based blotch detection and 3D vector median filtering for interpolation of missing data, and utilizes five consecutive frames. Performance of the method is tested on artificially corrupted image sequences and real motion picture films, and is compared to that of the three-frame-based method which involves similar algorithms except improved motion estimation and blotch detection. The results show that the method efficiently works even in severely blotched and motion regions in image sequences. (C) 2004 Elsevier BV. All rights reserved.