Matte-based video restoration technique embodiments are presented which model spatio-temporally varying film wear artifacts found in digitized copies of film media. In general, this is accomplished by employing residual color information in recovering of artifact mattes. To this end, the distributions of artifact colors and their fractional contribution to each pixel of each frame being considered are extracted based on color information from the spatial and temporal neighborhoods of the pixel. The extracted information can then be used to restore the video by removing the artifacts.