A multispectral design for a new generation of film scanners

Giorgio Trumpy, Jon Y. Hardeberg, Sony George, Barbara Flueckiger, Roger Groves, Haida Liang
2021 Optics for Arts, Architecture, and Archaeology VIII  
Some of the first home movies in color were shot on 16 mm lenticular film during the 1920s to 1940s. This very special film is embossed with a vertical array of hundreds of tiny cylindrical lenses that allowed to record color scenes on a blackwhite silver emulsion. The most efficient approach to obtain digital color images from these historical motion pictures is to scan the silver emulsion in high-resolution and let a software extract the encoded color information. The present work focuses on
more » ... he localization of the lenticular screen, which is the first and most complicated step of the color reconstruction. A 'classic' signal processing method proved to deliver successful results in some cases, but often adverse factorsdamaged or warped film, scanning problems-hinder the successful localization of the lenticular screen. Deep-doLCE explores a more advanced and robust method, using a big dataset of digitized lenticular films to train a new deep learning software. The aim is to create an easy-to-use software that revives awareness of the lenticular color processes thus making these precious historical color movies available again to public and securing them for posterity.
doi:10.1117/12.2592655 fatcat:qxfvq7s6rbhujnlmmwi5t57mai