Automated Image Color Mapping for a Historic Photographic Collection
This work addresses color restoration for a specific historic collection, making it accessible for researchers and the public, but it is incremental as it builds on existing histogram matching methods.
The paper tackled the problem of color distortion in a historic photographic collection by developing a modified histogram matching technique based on print chemistry, resulting in the correction of over 15,000 images and their release in an open repository.
In the 1970s, the United States Environmental Protection Agency sponsored Documerica, a large-scale photography initiative to document environmental subjects nation-wide. While over 15,000 digitized public-domain photographs from the collection are available online, most of the images were scanned from damaged copies of the original prints. We present and evaluate a modified histogram matching technique based on the underlying chemistry of the prints for correcting the damaged images by using training data collected from a small set of undamaged prints. The entire set of color-adjusted Documerica images is made available in an open repository.