Scratch Detection And

Removal From Old Videos &

Still Images
• Scratch Detection And Restoration
Why Important?

• Photographic archives are being

transferred to digital form

• Involves scanning of transmissive and

reflective media, namely slides or
negatives, and prints.

• Inevitably introduces new artifacts such

as dust particles and scratches which
causes degradation of quality
 Why Automate?
• Because of the huge number of the involved frames

• Detection and Removal

• The problem of automatic defect removal
is divided into two stages: detection and
removal

• Detection: Defective pixels identified

• Reconstruction: Defective pixels are

replaced with estimated original pixels
• Hurdles?
• Inaccurate detection :
Separating true defects and
intrinsic image features, such as
edges, line segments and various
textures.

• Inaccurate detection leads to

distortion of intrinsic image
features during the reconstruction
stage
• Artifacts in Old Films
• The main defect in old films are dust spots, line
scratches, abrasion, blotch, film unsteadiness
and intensity flicker

• Line scratches are one of the most annoying

artifacts in old films

• Caused by particle caught in film transport

mechanism, and when film passes over the
particles material being abraded and line
scratches are formed.
All about Scratch
• The width of line scratches are between 2-9
pixels

• In the center of line scratches, the intensity of

the pixel shows a very little fluctuation

• The level of the intensity values for line

scratches is higher than that of image edges

• Typically they are vertical (angle to the vertical

upto 5 degrees)

• Loss of color information in the region is

complete
(usually have bright or dark color)
• Scratch Detection
• Two major types:
i)Spatial methods
ii) Temporal methods

• Spatial- Spatial detection methods uses

strong vertical scratch property

• Temporal- Tracking of scratch in motion

compensated image frames
• OWE-based line scratch detection
• OWE is an undecimated wavelet transform with
translation invariant

• It locates the position of line scratches in each

scale as same as the position in the spatial domain
without any information damaged during the
wavelet transform

• From this point of view, OWE is more appropriate

than decimated wavelet transforms in image post-
processing

• Allows us to design a more efficacious and

precise position
for scratch than traditional methods
• Proposed Method
 Generalized Wavelet Expansion based
Algorithm
• To locate the line artifact and represent them
precisely, the algorithm adopts Over - complete
Wavelet Expansion
(OWE) representation of original image

• At the edge of line scratches area, horizontal

intensity
variation is much larger than vertical intensity
variation
• Flowchart of Algorithm
Grey Scale Colored
Image Image

rgb2gray

Im2double
OWE(A,H,V,D)
Double values

Sum V
(Vertical)
Mask (those i’s)

Local V
R(i) * R(j)<0
Maxima (R)
Scratch

V must have at least 35 0f 50 as above

average
• Steps
• Convert the image to grey scale if it is RGB and
change the values in double to apply Wavelet
transform in next step.

• Take Over - complete wavelet expansion (OWE).

• Assume that the original image has m by n pixels,

and denote W v(x,y) as first scale vertical wavelet
decomposition coefficient at the position of (x, y),
then the sum is: n
V M W v (x) = ∑ W v ( x , y ), ----- (1)
y=1
• We find the local maxima and minima and check if
there is local maxima and minima in nearby pixel
based on scratch width(5 pixel both side).

• Based on the fact that there are sharp horizontal

variations at both sides of line scratches and local
maximum and local minimum will be found at the left
side and right side of line
scratches respectively

xW Max={x|V MWv(x)>V MWv(x-1)&V MWv(x)>V

MWv(x+1),xεZ,1<=x<=m}

xW Min={x|V MWv(x)<V MWv(x-1)&V MWv(x)<V

MWv(x+1),xεZ,1<=x<=m}
For actual position of scratches

• A 40*5 block is taken as local block image and

pixel values are compared with average.

• If 30 pixel in a column has more or less than

average value than this column has a scratch in
particular block.
Scratched Image Scratch Detected
• Restoration
• Restoration improves the subjective visual
quality of archive

• To restore the film without causing distortion to

areas of the frames that are not affected, the
location of scratch must be located precisely

• Moreover a fully automatic restoration system is

very hard to develop, because the correction of
misalignment of brightness, detection and removal
of shot and scratch, noise reduction, etc.
• Assumption: Regions affected by scratches do
not contain original information

• Solution: Propagate neighboring clean

information into the degraded area

• The neighboring information can be found in the

same frame or also in the preceding and
successive frame exploiting the temporal
coherency
Functional block
diagram
Digital Analogue
Degraded Degraded
Sequence/image Sequence/image

Digital Encoder

Scratch
Detector OWE mask

Comparing Scratches
frames (Lessen False
Interpolation (Only for videos) Detection)

Restored
Seq/image
Result: Images scratch
removed

Scratched Image Scratch Removed

THANK YOU