A recent active area of image processing is the restoration of old movie films. Many of these old films are deteriorating and there are active efforts to convert them into digital form and remove distortions. One major problem affecting old movies is the presence of scratches. Devise a simple algorithm to identify scratches and 'repair' such scratches by replacing affected pixels by adjacent ones. In the basic project choose one colour and apply your scratch removal algorithm to the individual frames separately. An example of a movie affected by scratches can be found in the file
In this figure the left column shows the original frames. The middle column shows the frames after colour correction. The final column shows the frames after applying a scratch removal algorithm. Load this image into matlab using imread, then extract a frame from the middle column. This will have three colour layers (red, green, blue). Apply initially your algorithm to one frame of one of the colour layers. Use the multi-colour and multi-frame data set to aid the scratch removal algorithm.
Original five (left), provided restored images (middle) and resulting restored images of this project (right).