Automatic Background Adjustment for Chinese Paintings Using Pigment Lines

摘要

Most traditional Chinese paintings are painted on hand-made 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.