Mathematically-Based Algorithms for Film Digital Restoration

Since its invention, cinema has become an important media of popular culture, becoming part of our historical memory. Unfortunately, films are subject to a fast decay and aging, especially when the conservation conditions are not appropriate. The decay process is irreversible, and the digitalization is becoming the most diffuse and suitable way to conserve and restore films. Classic restoration software involves a significant human intervention and a work of supervision by qualified operators. Indeed, they require a frame-by-frame control and a further phase of manual cleaning. This workflow makes the restoration process expensive in terms of time and money, so that it can’t be afford by small audiovisual archives. The idea of our work is to provide a software which reduce the human intervention and that could be easily used even by small archives, being open source. Here we present, DustRemover, a semi-automatic software for digital film restoration.