Motion artifacts in the succulent images

In preparing the image of the Don Worth succulent for printing, I’ve discovered  a great many motion artifacts. Some of them, like this one caused by an insect crawling across one of the leaves:

need special attention.

However, there are many artifacts caused by motion of the leaves that could benefit from an automated solution. Here’s an example:

Note the vertical lines. They’re not on the plant. They don’t do anything for the image’s aesthetics. They have to go.

I took a look at one of the un-squeezed *and un-color-corrected) input files:

Ugly, huh. I figured that nothing is supposed to change rapidly in the time dimension — left to right in the above image. So why not try a long, skinny median filter? I wrote a little Matlab script:

that applies a median filter 1 pixel high by 32 pixels wide.

Here’s what comes out:

This could save me untold hours of boring retouching.