Removal of line artefacts for digital dissemination of archived film and video

Line scratches are a common form of degradation in archived motion picture film. The automatic restoration of such material has become of increasing interest in the last few years with the rise of consumer digital video applications and the need to supply more programming material of an acceptable quality in a multimedia context. This paper introduces mechanisms for removing line artefacts from degraded images. It also proposes schemes which solve both the image data and the hidden model parameters simultaneously. The algorithms introduced are based on the use of the 2D-AR process as an underlying image model and employ a Bayesian approach. The Gibbs sampler is used to draw samples from the underlying image texture and so create a convincing interpolation in the region previously obscured by the line feature.