A robust method of image flicker correction for heavily-corrupted old film sequences

The film material of old movies is often degraded heavily by several distortions such as flicker. To promote recycling of old films, we need to improve their picture quality. Image flickers are defined as undesirable image brightness fluctuations which do not originate from the scene, and are perceived as an annoying artifact. Image flickers are caused by several factors: aging of film, instability of chemical processing and telecine conversion. Hence, proper models of image flickers and their correction models are not known at all in advance. This paper deals with a hierarchy of flicker-correction models well suited for correcting image flickers contained in heavily-corrupted old film sequences, and develops a robust flicker-correction method which first estimates the correction-model parameters from the input old film sequence and then corrects its image flickers according to the estimated model without being disturbed by several distortions.