A fusion-based approach to digital movie restoration

Many algorithms have been proposed in literature for digital movie restoration; unfortunately, none of them ensures a perfect result whichever is the image sequence to be restored. Here we propose a new digital scratch restoration algorithm which achieves accuracy results higher than that of already existing algorithms and naturally adapts for implementation into high-performance computing environments. The basic idea of the proposed algorithm is to adopt several relatively well settled algorithms for the problem at hand and combine obtained results through suitable image fusion techniques, with the aim of taking advantage of adopted algorithms capabilities and, at the same time, limiting their deficiencies. Extensive experiments on real image sequences deeply investigate both accuracy results of the presented scratch restoration approach, which is shown to outperform other existing approaches, and performance of its parallel implementation, which allows for real-time restoration.