David Suter - Research Project

Historical Film Restoration

The motion picture industry is now over 100 years old. Many old, culturally valuable, films are in highly degraded form. They are in need of preservation and restoration.

We have been working on the restoration of many old films including: The Story of the Kelly Gang (made in 1906 in Melbourne, Australia and said by some to be the first feature length film produced in the world).

We remove frame shake (jitter), intensity (brightness) flicker, various scratches and blotches, dust spots - all digitally and automatically. We also look at the effects of video encoding such material.

A crucial stage in the noise removal is to estimate the motion in the image sequences (motion estimation is a common theme in much of our research. To see the effects, compare noise removal filtering without motion estimation/compensation:

with the results (still not perfect) after motion estimation/compensation:

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Movies - The Story of the Kelly Gang

Click on the images below to see movie files

Highly encoded example - hard to see beyond the coding artefacts!

Less highly encoded example - 5.6Mb in size!!

lightly encoded example - 420Mb in size!!

Movies - French Films