Time-Travel Rephotography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using StyleGAN2 to rephotograph historical figures from old photos, achieving unified restoration, colorization, and superresolution while preserving identity and pose.

Contribution

It presents a new approach that leverages StyleGAN2 for unified restoration and rephotography of old photos, outperforming existing filters in preserving identity and pose.

Findings

Significant improvements over state-of-the-art restoration filters.

Effective preservation of subject identity and pose.

High-quality rephotographs of historical figures.

Abstract

Many historical people were only ever captured by old, faded, black and white photos, that are distorted due to the limitations of early cameras and the passage of time. This paper simulates traveling back in time with a modern camera to rephotograph famous subjects. Unlike conventional image restoration filters which apply independent operations like denoising, colorization, and superresolution, we leverage the StyleGAN2 framework to project old photos into the space of modern high-resolution photos, achieving all of these effects in a unified framework. A unique challenge with this approach is retaining the identity and pose of the subject in the original photo, while discarding the many artifacts frequently seen in low-quality antique photos. Our comparisons to current state-of-the-art restoration filters show significant improvements and compelling results for a variety of important historical people.