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Main Authors: Tang, Tan, Wu, Yanhong, Gao, Junming, Wu, Yingcai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01274
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author Tang, Tan
Wu, Yanhong
Gao, Junming
Wu, Yingcai
author_facet Tang, Tan
Wu, Yanhong
Gao, Junming
Wu, Yingcai
contents Ancient Chinese paintings are a valuable cultural heritage that is damaged by irreversible color degradation. Reviving color-degraded paintings is extraordinarily difficult due to the complex chemistry mechanism. Progress is further slowed by the lack of comprehensive, high-quality datasets, which hampers the creation of end-to-end digital restoration tools. To revive colors, we propose PRevivor, a prior-guided color transformer that learns from recent paintings (e.g., Ming and Qing Dynasty) to restore ancient ones (e.g., Tang and Song Dynasty). To develop PRevivor, we decompose color restoration into two sequential sub-tasks: luminance enhancement and hue correction. For luminance enhancement, we employ two variational U-Nets and a multi-scale mapping module to translate faded luminance into restored counterparts. For hue correction, we design a dual-branch color query module guided by localized hue priors extracted from faded paintings. Specifically, one branch focuses attention on regions guided by masked priors, enforcing localized hue correction, whereas the other branch remains unconstrained to maintain a global reasoning capability. To evaluate PRevivor, we conduct extensive experiments against state-of-the-art colorization methods. The results demonstrate superior performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.
format Preprint
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle PRevivor: Reviving Ancient Chinese Paintings using Prior-Guided Color Transformers
Tang, Tan
Wu, Yanhong
Gao, Junming
Wu, Yingcai
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Ancient Chinese paintings are a valuable cultural heritage that is damaged by irreversible color degradation. Reviving color-degraded paintings is extraordinarily difficult due to the complex chemistry mechanism. Progress is further slowed by the lack of comprehensive, high-quality datasets, which hampers the creation of end-to-end digital restoration tools. To revive colors, we propose PRevivor, a prior-guided color transformer that learns from recent paintings (e.g., Ming and Qing Dynasty) to restore ancient ones (e.g., Tang and Song Dynasty). To develop PRevivor, we decompose color restoration into two sequential sub-tasks: luminance enhancement and hue correction. For luminance enhancement, we employ two variational U-Nets and a multi-scale mapping module to translate faded luminance into restored counterparts. For hue correction, we design a dual-branch color query module guided by localized hue priors extracted from faded paintings. Specifically, one branch focuses attention on regions guided by masked priors, enforcing localized hue correction, whereas the other branch remains unconstrained to maintain a global reasoning capability. To evaluate PRevivor, we conduct extensive experiments against state-of-the-art colorization methods. The results demonstrate superior performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.
title PRevivor: Reviving Ancient Chinese Paintings using Prior-Guided Color Transformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01274