Background adjustment and saturation enhancement in ancient Chinese paintings

This work presents a color enhancement scheme to virtually restore ancient Chinese paintings in electronic form. Two degradations result in color contrast loss in ancient Chinese paintings: paper aging and pigment fading. The proposed enhancement scheme comprises two subsequent methods: background adjustment and saturation enhancement. The former method, based on the Von Kries color conversion in the CIE xyY color space, retrieves the original color of the paint paper by modifying colors based on their similarity to the background color. The proposed saturation enhancement method makes colors more vivid and bright, and also improves the image contrast.