Blotch removal for old movie restoration using legendre moment and particle swarm optimization

A blotch is one among several artifacts that can degrade old movies which had been stored in films. Blotches are seen as randomly occurring black or white spots which are disturbing to the viewer. A novel approach to blotch removal for old movie restoration is presented in this paper. This method combines the merits of image representation using Legendre moments, warped distance interpolation and adaptive particle swarm optimisation. After detecting the blotches using the well known sROD detector, a feature vector comprising of Legendre moments and average gray value is interpolated for windows in the blotch region using the neighbouring pixel values in the known region. A warped distance approach has been used for better interpolation results. This is followed by a search for the optimum pixel values in the blotch region using adaptive particle swarm optimisation such that the feature vector for the estimated pixels match the interpolated one. Experiments show that this algorithm gives satisfactory results and superior performance.