Restoration of Damaged Korean Films by Using Various Image-Processing Techniques

Abstract

Recently, the digital cinema distribution chain has added an additional path for showing old, damaged films using proper restoration. Old films, which were acquired by low-quality cameras and stored in poor conditions, tend to have many defects compared with movies made with modern digital works. This paper presents a set of image-processing algorithms for enhancing and restoring old films severely degraded by camera jitter, film scratches, grain noise, and poor contrast. In 2005, the Korean Film Council reran 30-year-old animated films in high-quality digital standard. In this work we briefly introduce the restoration of these animated films and provide details of the additional ongoing restoration work on old Korean films with a consideration of the bottleneck between the main workflow and compatibility of intermediate equipment. Experimental results are presented for restored samples of old movies and animations followed by the workflow pipeline of the proposed restoration process.