A Mixed Perceptual and Physical-chemical Approach for the Restoration of Faded Positive Films

Restoring color of highly degraded movies can be a challenging task. In some cases the color left is almost null. For these cases no image enhancement technique can be appropriate. If the color information is completely disappeared only impainting technique can work , but if small information is left a dye fading model can be of some help. To perform color restoration we have proposed in previous paper a perceptual approach. Since the exact original film gamut is almost impossible , or too expensive , to reproduce within digital domain , the proposed idea is to reproduce the appearance of the frames more than their exact physical properties. This is an interesting kick-off technique able to perform a great percentage of the required correction. However in some cases information left is not sufficient to obtain satisfactory results. The proposed approach prefilter the color information left with a dye fading model before applying the perceptual method. Test and results are presented.