Making Old Film Great Again: Degradation-aware State Space Model for Old Film Restoration

Unlike modern native digital videos, the restoration of old films requires addressing specific degradations inherent to analog sources. However, existing specialized methods still fall short compared to general video restoration techniques. In this work, we propose a new baseline to re-examine the challenges in old film restoration. First, we develop an improved Mamba-based framework, dubbed MambaOFR, which can dynamically adjust the degradation removal patterns by generating degradation-aware prompts to tackle the complex and composite degradations present in old films. Second, we introduce a flow-guided mask deformable alignment module to mitigate the propagation of structured defect features in the temporal domain. Third, we introduce the first benchmark dataset that includes both synthetic and real-world old film clips. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing advanced approaches in old film restoration. The implementation and model will be released.