Line scratch restoration using flow vectors of spatio-temporal video cube

Line scratch is a prominent artefact in old films. In this paper, restoration of line scratch is proposed using spatio - temporal video cube. Video is considered as a cube and we assume that t, x and y are three flow directions of frames XY, TY and TX respectively. Vertical and horizontal line scratch is a line of some width in XY frame, but it appears as a rectangular patch in TY or TX frame. Such type of patches produce a discontinuity in the flow vector of these frames. Restoration method is divided into two steps. In the first step the discontinuity in flow vector is smoothed by applying a moving average filter and corrupted pixels in the patch area are recovered by transforming the backward and forward frames. Most of the missing data is recovered by this approach. A median filter is then applied on the scratch location of XY frame for smoothing the pixels. The proposed spatio-temporal technique has removed vertical and horizontal line scratches in old film video. The comparison of the proposed algorithm with existing methods validates the improved performance of our result.