You will find here:
- A short introduction to motion picture restoration
- A list of bibliographical references in BibTex format
- My list of publications on the subject
- My PhD theses "Automatic motion picture restoration"
- A list of Web links
What's motion picture restoration?
Today there are thousands of old motion pictures that are in very bad shape and that continue to deteriorate. These can be very old films or more recent ones, like the first color motion pictures. Motion picture restoration is the process that consists in correcting the defects of the damaged film in order to obtain a copy as close as possible to the original motion picture.
Why restore these motion pictures? There are two main reasons. First, these films represent an artistic and historic treasure that must be preserved. In order to do so, they have to be recorded on time-proof media (modern films or digital supports). In order to keep a copy as close as possible to the original one, a restoration phase is necessary.
The second reason is economic. Nowadays the television market is developping very fast thanks to the cable and to digital television. So the demand for good quality broadcasting material is increasing. Many old movies could be used if they were not damaged. An affordable restoration process could be used to give a second youth to many old films.
There are already manual and semi-automatic methods of film restoration, but they are so expensive that only the most important motion pictures can be restored. An automatic method would be cheaper, and as a consequence it could be applied to more motion pictures.
This work was financed by the European project ESPRIT-NOBLESSE. In fact restoration of old motion pictures has been chosen as application domain for the new image processing tools developped within the project.
This work has lead to a PhD thesis (in french) : Automatic Restoration of Old Motion Pictures.
The following link will take you to a list of publications related to motion picture restoration :