Color Restoration Survey and an Overdetermined System for Color Retrieval from Faded Images

This chapter presents a survey of the most widely used color restoration techniques from faded images. The purpose of the survey is to explain the reasons for color fading and emphasize how the color restoration techniques have evolved in recent years. The survey covers the color bleaching models, single-scale and multiscale retinex, gray world, max white, machine learning, and underwater color correction approaches. Image colorization, inpainting, and color constancy aspects are discussed in the machine learning portion of this survey. Numerous color restoration approaches are reviewed under the uncategorized techniques. An overdetermined system for retrieving the degraded color components from old faded images is presented as part of this survey. The system reviews three different approaches which combine the traditional max white, gray world, and retinex white balancing algorithms. In each approach, one of the three algorithms is eliminated while the other two are combined by a set of second-order equations.