A sampling based approach to line scratch removal from motion picture frames

We address the problem of detecting, and subsequently removing, 'line scratch' distortion in motion picture frames. A model for the lines' interaction with the image data is constructed. A sampling based algorithm based on the reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo framework is developed which enables automatic determination of both the unknown number of lines present, together with the lines' parameters. Previous work has not attempted to automatically determine the number of lines present. Our approach is widely applicable in many object recognition problems, where the number of objects is unknown.