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

Abstract: 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. In this paper, we present the first approach for the automatic removal of greening color defects in digitized autochrome photographs. Our main contributions include a method based on synthetic dataset generation and the use of generative AI with a carefully designed loss function for the restoration of visual arts. To address the lack of suitable training datasets for analyzing greening defects in damaged autochromes, we introduce a novel approach for accurately simulating such defects in synthetic data. We also propose a modified weighted loss function for the ChaIR method to account for color imbalances between defected and non-defected areas. While existing methods struggle with accurately reproducing original colors and may require significant manual effort, our method allows for efficient restoration with reduced time requirements.