Restoration of variable density film soundtracks

The restoration of motion picture films has been an active research field for many years. The restoration of the soundtrack however has mainly been performed at the audio domain in spite of the fast that it is recorded as a continuous image on the film stock. In this paper, we propose a new restoration method for variable density soundtracks. The method first detects and corrects accurately the azimuth deviation. A robust thresholding technique based on the minimization of the total variation is then performed to remove the remaining faults. Restoration results are very promising and testify to the efficiency of our method.