Automatic Film Line Scratch Removal System based on Spatial Information

In this paper, an automatic film line scratch removal system is developed that can deal with all kind of scratches. For this we use the spatial information of scratches: the scratch in old films has lower or higher brightness than neighboring pixels in its vicinity and usually appears as a vertically long thin line. Our system consists of scratch detection and scratch restoration. The scratches of various types are detected by neural network based texture classifier and morphology-based shape filter and then the degraded regions are restored using bilinear interpolation. To assess the validity of the proposed method, it has been tested with all kinds of scratches, and then experimental results show that the proposed approach leads to not only robust but also efficient scratch restoration.