A spatiotemporal image sequence restoration algorithm

Temporal restoration of image sequences may fail because of erroneously estimated motion. Motion estimation failures may occur for several reasons -complicated motion, severe artefacts, or a combination of both. We present an algorithm that tries to overcome at least the problems related to severe artefacts. It consists of a spatial restoration, which is supposed to recover the general image structure within the missing areas, followed by a temporal restoration. Performing spatial restoration first has the advantage that motion estimation during temporal restoration can rely on the spatially restored frames. The efficiency of the spatial restoration scheme is demonstrated for both artificial and real life examples. Restoration results when using only temporal restoration are presented for the real life sequences. Finally, we compare both restoration methods with the results of the proposed spatiotemporal algorithm and show its superior behaviour.