Film and video archive restoration using mathematical morphology

Interest has, in recent years, been increasing in the area of archive film restoration. This can no doubt be attributed to the emergence of digital television broadcasting and the increase in video sales. To meet this demand, it is becoming inmasingly attractive to make archive material available to this market. Unfortunately, much archive material has been corrupted in some way and, prior to resale or broadcast, it is necessary for the material to undergo some form of restoration. Here, we address the problem of video and film restoration using mathematical morphology. We describe a method for the optimisation of multidimensional grey-swle soft morphological aters, with respect to specific objective image suality criteria, and their application in archive film restoration. Specifically, we address the problem known asjh dirt. For video scratch problems we present a method for mapping the problem back to the finmat of the original video tape and repairbg the faults using mathematical morphology. This paper is a summary of work presented in various meetings over the last four years.