Blotch Detection in Archive Films Based on Visual Saliency Map

Degradations frequently occur in archive films that symbolize the historical and cultural heritage of a nation. In this study, the problem of detection blotches commonly encountered in archive films is handled. Here, a block-based blotch detection method is proposed based on a visual saliency map. The visual saliency map reveals prominent areas in an input frame and thus enables more accurate results in the blotch detection. A simple and effective visual saliency map method is taken into consideration in order to reduce computational complexity for the detection phase. After the visual saliency maps of the given frames are obtained, blotch regions are estimated by considered spatiotemporal patches - without the requirement for motion estimation - around the saliency pixels, which are subjected to a prethresholding process. Experimental results show that the proposed block-based blotch detection method provides a significant advantage with reducing false alarm rates over HOG feature (Yous and Serir, 2017), LBP feature (Yous and Serir, 2017), and regions-matching (Yous and Serir, 2016) methods presented in recent years. © 2020 Yildiz Aydin and Bekir Dizdaroǧlu.