Neural Restoration of Greening Defects in Historical Autochrome Photographs Based on Purely Synthetic Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sinha, Saptarshi Neil, Kuehn, P. Julius, Koppe, Johannes, Kuijper, Arjan, Weinmann, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sinha, Saptarshi Neil
Kuehn, P. Julius
Koppe, Johannes
Kuijper, Arjan
Weinmann, Michael
author_facet Sinha, Saptarshi Neil
Kuehn, P. Julius
Koppe, Johannes
Kuijper, Arjan
Weinmann, Michael
contents The preservation of early visual arts, particularly color photographs, is challenged by deterioration caused by aging and improper storage, leading to issues like blurring, scratches, color bleeding, and fading defects. Despite great advances in image restoration and enhancement in recent years, such systematic defects often cannot be restored by current state-of-the-art software features as available e.g. in Adobe Photoshop, but would require the incorporation of defect-aware priors into the underlying machine learning techniques. However, there are no publicly available datasets of autochromes with defect annotations. In this paper, we address these limitations and present the first approach that allows the automatic removal of greening color defects in digitized autochrome photographs. For this purpose, we introduce an approach for accurately simulating respective defects and use the respectively obtained synthesized data with its ground truth defect annotations to train a generative AI model with a carefully designed loss function that accounts for color imbalances between defected and non-defected areas. As demonstrated in our evaluation, our approach allows for the efficient and effective restoration of the considered defects, thereby overcoming limitations of alternative techniques that struggle with accurately reproducing original colors and may require significant manual effort.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22291
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Restoration of Greening Defects in Historical Autochrome Photographs Based on Purely Synthetic Data
Sinha, Saptarshi Neil
Kuehn, P. Julius
Koppe, Johannes
Kuijper, Arjan
Weinmann, Michael
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
The preservation of early visual arts, particularly color photographs, is challenged by deterioration caused by aging and improper storage, leading to issues like blurring, scratches, color bleeding, and fading defects. Despite great advances in image restoration and enhancement in recent years, such systematic defects often cannot be restored by current state-of-the-art software features as available e.g. in Adobe Photoshop, but would require the incorporation of defect-aware priors into the underlying machine learning techniques. However, there are no publicly available datasets of autochromes with defect annotations. In this paper, we address these limitations and present the first approach that allows the automatic removal of greening color defects in digitized autochrome photographs. For this purpose, we introduce an approach for accurately simulating respective defects and use the respectively obtained synthesized data with its ground truth defect annotations to train a generative AI model with a carefully designed loss function that accounts for color imbalances between defected and non-defected areas. As demonstrated in our evaluation, our approach allows for the efficient and effective restoration of the considered defects, thereby overcoming limitations of alternative techniques that struggle with accurately reproducing original colors and may require significant manual effort.
title Neural Restoration of Greening Defects in Historical Autochrome Photographs Based on Purely Synthetic Data
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22291