Image Recovery for Ancient Chinese Paintings

Abstract

This work presents a new method to virtually recover ancient Chinese paintings in electronic form. Two factors result in the degradation of ancient Chinese paintings: pigment fading and paper aging. Thus, the proposed method first uses guided filter to enhance the original painting image. Then, the semi-transparent stroke as the image foreground can be extracted from the background of painting image by adopting a novel bi-extracting method. Two independent maps that respectively produced by the saliency detection and the pseudoalpha matting are fused to represent the foreground stroke. Finally, the ancient painting image is recovered by altering the color of the background. Experiments on a variety of ancient Chinese paintings show the robustness and accuracy of the proposed method.