Enhancing Preservation and Restoration of Open Reel Audio Tapes Through Computer Vision

Analog audio documents inevitably face degradation over time, posing a challenge for preserving their audio content and ensuring the integrity of the recordings. Analog document preservation is one of the main research topics of interest of the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) of the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua, which over the years developed and implemented a methodology for preservation that includes, among other things, the video recording of the digitization process of the open-reel tapes for documenting irregularities on the top of their surface. Together with the corpus of digitized high-quality audio recordings, this led to the creation of an internal archive of video documents. This paper presents a software application that leverages computer vision techniques to automatically detect Irregularities on open-reel audio tapes, analyzing the video documents produced during the digitization interventions. The software employs a frame-by-frame analysis to automatically identify and highlight points of interest that may indicate tape damages, splices, and other Irregularities. The software uses Generalized Hough Transform and SURF algorithms to locate regions of interest within the tape. The proposed software is also part of the MPAI/IEEE-CAE ARP standard developed by Audio Innova s.r.l., spin-off of the CSC, and it may offer a robust and efficient solution for analyzing open-reel audio tapes, supporting archivists and musicologists in their activities.