Color restoration of old photos using the curvelet transform

Abstract

In the last few years, the restoration of faded colors from old pictures and printings has been a very competitive issue for image specialists. In this paper, a new approach for color restoration is introduced. The proposed technique is implemented in the frequency (curvelet) domain. In this work, the focus is on color enhancements and restoration from the low-frequency components. The high-frequency components are left without changes. Color restoration is applied to the red and blue channels of the RGB image; the green channel is kept without changes. Experimental results provide a comparison between color restoration from the curvelet-based and spatial domain techniques including the combined grey world and retinex.