AbsoluteDegradation: A Physics-Inspired Synthetic Film-Degradation Pipeline and Archival Film Restoration Benchmark

arXiv:2607.02131v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Restoring archival film remains a fundamentally challenging problem due to the absence of paired training data and the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks. Pristine versions of deteriorated footage are physically unrecoverable, requiring supervised methods to rely on synthetic data that often fail to capture the complex, temporally coherent nature of real film degradation. At the same time, existing real-world datasets are limited in scale, quality, and accessibility, hindering reliable evaluation and fair comparison across methods. We address both limitations with AbsoluteDegradation, a physics-inspired, modular pipeline for synthesizing realistic film degradations, and a new large-scale archival benchmark. The proposed pipeline models the analog-to-digital process as a structured composition of artifact families, incorporating signal-dependent grain, parametric scratches, and temporally coherent camera motion, enabling controlled generation of diverse degradation regimes. In parallel, we introduce a curated dataset of 81,576 high-resolution frames sourced from real archival footage, designed for consistent evaluation under real-world conditions. Together, these contributions provide a unified framework for training and benchmarking restoration models. Experiments across six restoration architectures, evaluated with no-reference image quality metrics, clip-level temporal quality assessment, and a blinded human preference study (93 raters, 1,395 trials), show that models trained with AbsoluteDegradation generalize better to real-world footage: human raters preferred them in 64.7% of comparisons and for every evaluated architecture. The proposed benchmark also reveals systematic failure modes of current methods and of no-reference metrics. We hope this work establishes a foundation for reproducible and domain-authentic evaluation in archival film restoration.