Patent ID: 8078002

Claim:
A computer-implemented process for restoring frames of a video derived from a film-based medium by removing spatio-temporally varying artifacts caused by film wear, the process comprising using a computer to perform the following process actions: inputting a prescribed number of consecutive frames of the video; estimating a distribution of prescribed artifact colors in the pixels of the inputted frames, and for each pixel in the inputted frames, estimating an alpha value which represents the fractional contribution to the pixel of a true color the pixel would exhibit without any artifact color contamination, and estimating an alpha-premultiplied true color, said estimations being based on the colors of pixels observed in a prescribed spatial neighborhood and a prescribed temporal neighborhood of each pixel of the inputted frames and a prescribed initial value of the alpha-premultiplied true color for each pixel; repeating the estimating actions using the last-estimated alpha premultiplied true color of each pixel in lieu of the initial or last-employed alpha premultiplied true color, for a prescribed number of iterations, or until the last-estimated alpha premultiplied true color of each pixel does not change between iterations to more than a prescribed degree; estimating a restored color for each pixel of each inputted frame using the estimated alpha values and estimated alpha-premultiplied true colors associated with that pixel and the pixels in the prescribed spatial and temporal neighborhoods of that pixel; and replacing the observed color of each pixel in each inputted frame with the restored color for that pixel.