Image sequence restoration in the presence of pathological motion and severe artifacts

Incorrect motion vectors represent the main reason why current image sequence restoration schemes fail. We present a scheme that 1) identifies areas that are likely to contain wrong motion vectors, 2) finds artifacts within these areas, and 3) restores these artifacts: Although temporal information is commonly used in nowadays restoration systems [7, 12], in this particular case the artifact restoration cannot rely on it due to the uncertain motion information. Hence, the restoration needs to rely on spatial information alone. The novel spatial restoration algorithm that we introduce here, performs a non-linear interpolation that preserves the edges surrounding the artifact area. In this way, the general structure of the image is reconstructed. The restoration algorithm is demonstrated on both artificial and real life examples, and the advantages of the proposed edge-based restoration are highlighted. In addition, results are shown for the proposed complete image sequence restoration scheme.