Abstract
The preservation of open-reel audio tapes is critical for maintaining valuable cultural and historical audio archives, yet current digitisation and analysis operations are often error-prone due to tape degradation and the long duration of the recordings. Considering the analog nature of this kind of recording, anomaly detection algorithms, applied to the video of the tape flowing on the playback head, can be used to detect errors and details with musicological value. This paper presents a new dataset of high-quality videos and a new algorithm for anomaly detection on audio tapes. Experimental results show notable improvements in detection performance, though false positives remain a challenge at higher speeds. Additionally, the new algorithm supports a wider range of playback speeds, improving its flexibility. This improvement is an important step towards a reliable implementation of the IEEE/MPAI CAE ARP standard (3302-2022).