Color restoration and image retrieval for Dunhuang fresco preservation

Abstract

Dunhuang Mogao Cave, located in Gansu province, is a typical Chinese heritage site. Well preserved, the caves contain more than 555 grottoes, 2,000 painted statues, and 5,000 square meters of wall paintings. Scientists and artists have worked for a long time on how to preserve and restore the murals' colors, but have not found satisfactory methods. Discovering how to use advanced computer techniques to preserve, restore, and reuse Dunhuang fresco art information is a very interesting and complex task. In our project, we integrate many techniques, such as image processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, and intelligent reasoning, to deal with these problems. Restoration of the frescoes is the basic focus of our project. Because of human activity, most of the frescoes fade day-by-day, with some seriously damaged. We propose a new, intelligent approach to color restoration. Each restored fresco will be preserved in the fresco database along with the original. For many of the Dunhuang frescoes, the key to preservation is to find an effective method for organizing, storing, managing, and retrieving the fresco data. We adopt content- and semantics-based image retrieval methods to solve these problems. Our fresco database will support Dunhuang pattern creation and virtual cave travel, reusing the fresco art information from the database. In this article, we mainly focus on the color restoration and retrieval techniques we use for fresco preservation.