Introduction

Frame misalignment is a serious problem which affects most old films: it reduces their visual quality and hampers their restoration.

Frames of old motion pictures may suffer from vertical and horizontal movements, typically due to problems related to irregular mechanical flow of the film; these movements are very annoying from a visual standpoint and, moreover, constitute a crucial problem for possible following restoration steps where motion vector estimation is involved. Some algorithms have been presented in the literature to solve the problem of frame misalignment. Most of these methods require a steady image to be used as a reference for the following steps, which implies that all the frames will be corrected with respect to the reference one; this approach can fail in presence of large displacements caused by the camera motions.

Proposed solution

A simple and very effective frame stabilisation algorithm has been presented, which is able to efficaciously eliminate this artifact and does not require a steady reference frame. Camera panning effects, which may be present in the scene in the form of global motion, are not affected.

You can download two sample sequences: the first file contains the sequence "Stefan" artificially corrupted by horizontal and vertical misalignment. The second file shows the restored sequence.

STEFAN CORRUPTED about 4 MegaBytes

STEFAN CORRECTED about 4 MegaBytes

We suggest to save the sequences in the local hard drive before looking at the movies.