The archives of motion pictures represent an important part of precious cultural heritage. Unfortunately, these
cinematography collections are vulnerable to different distortions such as colour fading which is beyond the
capability of photochemical restoration process. Spatial colour algorithms-Retinex and ACE provide helpful
tool in restoring strongly degraded colour films but, there are some challenges associated with these algorithms.
We present an automatic colour correction technique for digital colour restoration of strongly degraded movie
material. The method is based upon the existing STRESS algorithm. In order to cope with the problem of highly
correlated colour channels, we implemented a preprocessing step in which saturation enhancement is performed
in a PCA space. Spatial colour algorithms tend to emphasize all details in the images, including dust and
scratches. Surprisingly, we found that the presence of these defects does not affect the behaviour of the colour
correction algorithm. Although the STRESS algorithm is already in itself more efficient than traditional spatial
colour algorithms, it is still computationally expensive. To speed it up further, we went beyond the spatial
domain of the frames and extended the algorithm to the temporal domain. This way, we were able to achieve
an 80 percent reduction of the computational time compared to processing every single frame individually. We
performed two user experiments and found that the visual quality of the resulting frames was significantly better
than with existing methods. Thus, our method outperforms the existing ones in terms of both visual quality
and computational efficiency.
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