Alternative Methods for Digital Contrast Restoration

Nowadays cinematographic frame restoration is the mere use of commercial software performed manually by operators trained basically on them. In this work, we propose an alternative unsupervised method for contrast restoration that can be used as kick-off step in the enhancement pipeline or to perform a complete restoration. The proposed approach is based on a Spatial Color Algorithm (SCA), inspired by the dynamic behavior of the Human Visual System. This family of algorithms enhances automatically the amount of contrast correction according to the input, and thanks to this characteristic, it is able to measure the reliable digital restoration and the frame visual content. In this paper we present the application of one SCA to the documentary “Le Isole della Laguna” (1948) directed by Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras (1948). Moreover, we describe in detail the restoration pipeline that concerns the use of SCAs and we present the results assessment through different statistical metrics that measures different image features.