Abstract
Old movies suffer from several degradations mainly due to the archiving conditions. Since most of the old films represent an important amount of valuable data in scientific, cultural, social and economical purposes, it is mandatory to preserve them by resorting to fully digital and automatic restoration techniques. Among the existing degradations, blotches have been found to be very visually unpleasant artifacts and hence, many efforts have been devoted to design blotch correction procedures. Generally, two-step restoration procedures have been investigated: a blotch detection is performed prior to the correction of the degradation. The contribution of our approach is twofold. Firstly, the blotch detection is carried out on a multiscale representation of the degraded frames. Secondly, statistical tests are employed to locate the underlying artifacts. In this paper, we aim at achieving two objectives. In one hand, we improve the detection performances by exploiting into the statistical test, the interscale dependencies existing between the coefficients of the considered multiscale representation of the underlying frames. In the other hand, an efficient spatio-temporal inpainting-based technique of filling-in missing areas is used in order to estimate the information masked by the blotches. Experimental results indicate the efficiency of our approach compared to conventional blotch correction methods.