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We propose to detect defects in old movies, as the first step of a larger framework of old movies restoration by inpainting techniques. The specificity of our work is to learn a film restorer's expertise from a pair of sequences, composed of a movie with defects, and the same movie which was semiautomatically restored with the help of a specialized software. In order to detect those defects with minimal human interaction and further reduce the time spent for a restoration, we feed a U-Net with consecutive defective frames as input to detect the unexpected variations of pixel intensity over space and time. Since the output of the network is a mask of defect location, we first have to create the dataset of mask frames on the basis of restored frames from the software used by the film restorer, instead of classical synthetic ground truth, which is not available. These masks are estimated by computing the absolute difference between restored frames and defectuous frames, combined with thresholding and morphological closing. Our network succeeds in automatically detecting real defects with more precision than the manual selection with an all-encompassing shape, including some the expert restorer could have missed for lack of time.

We propose a new video inpainting model for movies restoration application. Our model combines structural reconstruction with a diffusion-based method and textural reconstruction with a patch-based method. Both proposed energies (one for each method) are alternatively minimized in order to preserve the overall structure while adding textural refinement. While the structural reconstruction is obtained jointly with optical flow computation with several proximal approaches, the textural reconstruction is processed by a variational non-local approach. Preliminary results on different Middlebury frames show quality improvement in the reconstruction.

Colorization of gray-scale images relies on prior color information. Examplar-based methods use a color image as source of such information. Then the colors of the source image are transferred to the gray-scale image. In the literature, this transfer is mainly guided by texture descriptors. Face images usually contain few texture so that the common approaches frequently fail. In this paper we propose a new method based on image morphing. This technique is able to compute a correspondence map between images with similar shapes. It is based on the geometric structure of the images rather than textures which is more reliable for faces. Our numerical experiments show that our morphing based approach clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, preprint