Interpolation of scratches in motion picture films

Movie films are often damaged through ageing, chemical changes and contact with mechanical parts of a film projector. In this paper a method for the removal of scratches and undesirable lines in digitised film sequences is discussed. The method assumes the prior knowledge about the position and orientation of the scratches and utilises an iterative method to interpolate the affected pixels. The convergence of the algorithm is guaranteed for the noise free case and the optimal choice of the involved relaxation parameter is demonstrated. The method was validated using sampled movies and proved to be stable even in the presence of noise. Remarkable is the reconstruction result in comparison to standard interpolation techniques like cubic splines.