Motion Picture Restoration, 1

The manipulation of pictures and video in digital form has been an established research activity for more than twenty years. It is only recently, however, that digital image and video processing equipment has been accessible to the gen eral public. This is due in part to the rapidly growing economy. of the home computer. A major contributing factor has been the marked rise in the pres ence of the non-academic user on the internet, particularly the World Wide Web (WWW). Manipulating digital imagery has become synonymous with the WWW. It is the drive to present audio and visual media to the home user in an interactive form and to increase the available range of choices, which has encouraged agreements to begin digital video television broadcasting before the turn of the century. With the increased demand for video material, there is a perceived increase in demand for material from archive sources and this has fuelled commercial interest in automatic digital restoration processes. Further more there is a continuing effort to design techniques for correcting errors in received compressed video bit streams for the purposes of live communications links over noisy channels e. g. mobile telephones and the internet. This book introduces the reader to a range of digital restoration activities beyond the well traversed areas of noise reduction and deblurring. It describes a number of problems associated with archived film and video.