The reconstruction of missing frames in historical films, a layered approach

Abstract

Since the very beginning of cinematography, a historic wealth of information has been recorded and stored on film. Unfortunately, the very celluloid medium on which motion pictures are captured proves to be ultimately susceptible to severe degradation. These ageing affects should be reversed as much as possible. In addition, since manual restoration is a tedious and costly process, an automatic or semi automatic system is highly desirable. This paper addresses the most severe form of film degradation, in which complete sequences of frames are beyond repair by traditional restoration techniques, or are simply lost permanently. To this end, we propose a layered approach to the frame reconstruction problem, in which a reasonable amount of user interaction is allowed to completely resynthesize a given number of frames. We will demonstrate the results of our technique on a number of sequences from actual archive footage.