Simulating of Authentic Movie Faults

Film recordings from the beginning of the century get deteriorated during time. There are many reasons for the decreasing quality. Mainly the quality decreases because of faults arising due to bad maintenance of the reproduction-equipment or inappropriate storage of the film. Research-institutions have been trying to restore faults on motion pictures using digital image processing for the last couple of years. Many methods for correcting typical faults, such as scratches, dust and dirt are known. Nearly every approach fixing a fault brings different results and therefore rating the quality of an individual restoration is a difficult task. Mostly it is judged based on the subjective perception of an audience. As the original state of the material is not known in most cases a comparison between the original undestroyed and restored state is not possible. A solution to this problem could be the simulation of faults on a not destroyed picture sequence in order to apply developed restoration algorithms on it. This paper is about a developed application which is intended to fill this gap by simulating faults as realistic as possible in order to test restoration-methods