Radoslav Markov
MR. Markov is PhD student of Audiovisual restoration and enhancement at the Bulgarian academy of sciences. He studied Economics, Sound engineering and film/TV directing. He is a voting member of SMPTE standardisation committees for video and cinema, member of French CST - high technical commission to the French Ministry of culture, Board member of edcf - edcf.net. He is frequently invited for presentations to international forums like IBC Amsterdam, ARRI Archival workshop, No Time to Wait and similar events focused on audiovisual. In 2016 and 2021 he is "The most innovative enterprise of the year" of the President of Bulgaria.
Session
This session addresses the increasing demand for the restoration of audiovisual archive content, considering the abundance of visual archives, videos and films worldwide. However, the current manual restoration methods and non-AI algorithms are both time-consuming and costly. Furthermore, although AI-based restoration techniques exist, they have not yet attained the desired quality.
In response to these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of manual restoration with the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of AI techniques. By leveraging existing AI frameworks and adapting them to the task of restoration, this method aims to surpass the limitations of previous approaches. The proposed method relies on a workflow that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) frameworks, originally designed for other applications, to achieve efficient and high-quality restoration and enhancement. Initially, keyframes are automatically selected from the original material. These keyframes undergo AI-based restoration or enhancement, guided by human supervision. This collaborative approach ensures that the AI models produce results aligned with the desired quality standards. Finally, a style transfer Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is employed to apply the restored/enhanced keyframes to the remaining portions of the original material, resulting in a coherent and visually pleasing restoration.