Automatic Background Adjustment for Chinese Paintings Using Pigment Lines

摘要

Most traditional Chinese paintings are painted on handmade paper that easily suffers from severe spectral changes caused by prolonged light exposure, resulting in color distortion and low contrast. To recover the original appearance of a Chinese painting, especially its background color, an automatic background adjustment framework is proposed. This framework is based on the insightful observation that the fading model of a painting image is analogue to the common hazy image formation model when the painting image is transformed into the K-M (Kubelka-Munk) space. We demonstrate that this fading model is quite useful in extracting pigment lines from any painting image. These pigment lines represent clusters of distinct color pigments used in a Chinese painting, which is the key to density map estimation and background restoration. Experimental results prove that our approach is able to restore a variety of deteriorated Chinese paintings without any user intervention or training.