Wavelet-based blotch detection in old movies using an adaptive MRME scheme

We are interested in detecting blotches in degraded old films. Most often, compensating the motion between the supposed degraded image and the reference ones is performed prior to the detection in order to reduce the false alarms due to the object motions. The novelty of the approach we propose in this paper is to integrate the motion estimation procedure into the detection procedure itself in order to improve the performances. More precisely, our rationale is to exploit not only the intensity similarities between regions of the degraded image and the one to be compensated, but also the orientation similarities of the image structures at different resolution levels. The evaluation performances performed on real color degraded (digitized) films show clearly the gain drawn from the proposed approach.