Spikes of brightness often affect locally single frames of aged motion pictures, because of dust, dirt and scratches injuring film surface. In this paper we present a method for accurate digital detection and restoration of such a kind of film defects.

The method evaluates both global and local intra-frame disparity statistics after motion-compensation and uses them to detect abnormal spikes.

It recovers image structure from the same frame by linear interpolation of defect surroundings and refines details from temporal neighbourhood. Weights of the blending filter are set according to local reliability of the motion estimation maps.

A texture pattern is also extracted from spatial support areas, and added to regions with limited recover from the temporal neighbourhood.

Experiments performed on synthetic sequences show very high recall and precision rates, and low recovery errors. High quality restoration of severely injured sequences is shown.