Restoration of Variable Area Soundtracks

Film restoration using digital image processing has been an active research field. However, the restoration of the soundtrack has been mainly performed in the sound domain, using signal processing methods, in spite of the fact that it is recorded as a continuous image between the film images and the perforations. In this paper, we present a complete system for variable area optical soundtrack restoration at the image level. The scanned soundtrack is treated using morphological operators, including a novel quasi-distance function. Working with the image representation of the soundtrack allows to take advantage of its redundancy. Moreover, with this approach only those defects that have been caused by ageing are corrected. The first results, concerning variable area soundtracks, are reported.