Trainable post-processing method to reduce false alarms in the detection of small blotches of archive films

We have developed a new semi-automatic neural network based method to detect blotches with low false alarm rate on archive films. Blotches can be modeled as temporal intensity discontinuities, hence false detection results originate from object motion (e.g. occlusion), non-rigid objects or erroneous motion estimation. In practice, usually, after the automatic detection step the false alarms are removed manually by an operator, significantly decreasing the efficiency of the restoration process. Our post-processing method classifies each detected blotch by its image features to minimize false results and the necessity of human intervention. The proposed method is tested on real archive sequences.