Time-Travel Rephotography
This work provides a unified approach to restore historical photographs, making them more accessible and visually appealing for historians, researchers, and the general public.
This paper addresses the problem of restoring old, faded, black and white historical photos by simulating rephotography with a modern camera. It leverages the StyleGAN2 framework to project antique photos into the space of modern high-resolution photos, resulting in significant improvements over current state-of-the-art restoration filters.
Many historical people were only ever captured by old, faded, black and white photos, that are distorted due to the limitations of early cameras and the passage of time. This paper simulates traveling back in time with a modern camera to rephotograph famous subjects. Unlike conventional image restoration filters which apply independent operations like denoising, colorization, and superresolution, we leverage the StyleGAN2 framework to project old photos into the space of modern high-resolution photos, achieving all of these effects in a unified framework. A unique challenge with this approach is retaining the identity and pose of the subject in the original photo, while discarding the many artifacts frequently seen in low-quality antique photos. Our comparisons to current state-of-the-art restoration filters show significant improvements and compelling results for a variety of important historical people.