Best way to remove static dust?

[Sartyx]

I am currently cleaning up some super-8 videos. A lot of dust and scratches could be removed with several avisynth scripts using RemoveGrain, Removedirt and so on.
However one of the videos contains a lot of static dirt and it looks like all the tools have serious problem with these static spots.
I also tried the neatvideo demo but it is blurring too much and it isn´t able to handle this noise either.

Some frames from the video:


Another approach would be photoshop, the spot healing doesn´t work unless I´d process each frame manually. Apart from the insane amount of work the spot healing tool
is just copying surrounded areas and I have the feeling that could look weird in a video.

So I thought of using an action by manipulating the luminance of the spots, but as you can see this isn´t working too well either.
I wonder if there is program/plugin that is able to handle this type of dust better.

[manono]

A video is worth a thousand pictures (or words). Please upload an untouched video sample - 10 seconds or so - that shows the problem.

[Sartyx]

Okay, Here we go...

[jagabo]

I generated an image of the spots by averaging many frames together, touched it up a bit by hand, then:

LSmashVideoSource("C:\Users\John\Downloads\usedom_10s.mp4") 

spots = ImageSource("C:\Users\John\Downloads\usedom_spots.png", start=0, end=framecount, fps=framerate).Invert().ConvertToYV12()
spots = spots.ColorYUV(off_y=-95)
#return(spots.Histogram())

Overlay(last, spots, mode="add")
ColorYUV(off_y=-12)
BilinearResize(width/2, height/2)
RemoveDirtMC(50)

If you have some frames of the spots on a white (or other solid) background you could get a better spot image to subtract.


[Attachment 41556 - Click to enlarge]

[Sartyx]

Wow, that result looks amazing! I´ll check it out on the whole video. Thanks jagabo!

[Sartyx]

Works perfect, may I ask what you used to average the frames? Avisynth Average?

[jagabo]

To average frames I used several Merge() command in a row:

Merge(SelectEven(), SelectOdd()) # average of 2 frames
Merge(SelectEven(), SelectOdd()) # average of 4 frames
Merge(SelectEven(), SelectOdd()) # average of 8 frames
Merge(SelectEven(), SelectOdd()) # average of 16 frames
Merge(SelectEven(), SelectOdd()) # average of 32 frames
etc.

I then opened that in an editor, picked a frame that was near the end (because it had the least detail, aside from the spots) and exported a still. It still contained a boat in the middle of the frame so I erased it by hand.

[Sartyx]

Thanks, I´ll give that a try if my attempt with ImageJ and 2000 frames fails. Up to now it looks good but takes a while of course.