A Double-Matched Method for Color Recovery

Photography and motion pictures play an important role in our society as artistic medium, historical document, and information carriers,  representing cultural values which have to be preserved. These photos, however, are often very faded. Using powerful multimedia platforms, faded pictures can be digitized at a high resolution, processed and reproduced, thus allowing a digital restoration of old photos making them vivid. This paper presents a double-matched method for color recovery using the color information of referenced image based on color transfer. This method uses brightness matching between referenced image and faded image to change faded image´s color, and combines with the color information of the faded image. It first selects a few spare colors based on brightness matching and then gets the color recovery result according to the best matching result between the spare colors and the object color. Experiments indicate that this algorithm has good performance and can be applied to the color recovery.