Automatic Restoration of Scratch in Old Archive

This paper presents scratch restoration method that can deal with scratches of various lengths and widths in old film. The proposed method consists of detection and reconstruction. The detection is performed using texture and shape properties of the scratches: first, each pixel is classified as scratches and non-scratches using a neural network (NN)-based texture classifier, and then some false alarms are removed by shape filtering. Thereafter, the detected region is reconstructed. Here, the reconstruction is formulated as energy minimization problem, thus genetic algorithm is used as optimization algorithm. The experimental result with well-known old films showed the effectiveness of the proposed method.