Color restoration techniques for faded colors of old photos, printings and paintings

Abstract

Color restoration of old pictures, printings, slides, films and paintings has gained special attention in the last decade. The value of these old pictures and paintings is the real motive for developing good color restoration techniques. In this paper, two approaches for color restoration are introduced. The first approach is a combination of the standard deviation-weighted gray world and the Combined Gray World and Retinex (CGWR) techniques. The second approach is based on some modifications of the Multi Scale Retinex (MSR) theory. These modifications are developed to imitate the effect of the neighboring pixels on the human eye. The output of the modified MSR is introduced to the CGWR algorithm in an attempt to enhance the performance of the original technique. In this paper, experimental results provide a comparison between the two proposed color restoration approaches and some traditional basic techniques.