Automated Image Color Mapping for a Historic Photographic Collection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a chemistry-informed histogram matching method to restore color in damaged historic photographs from the Documerica collection, making the images more accurate and accessible.

Contribution

It presents a novel color correction technique based on print chemistry, tailored for damaged historical images, and provides an open repository of the corrected images.

Findings

Improved color accuracy in damaged photographs

Effective correction using chemistry-based histogram matching

Open access to the enhanced image collection

Abstract

In the 1970s, the United States Environmental Protection Agency sponsored Documerica, a large-scale photography initiative to document environmental subjects nation-wide. While over 15,000 digitized public-domain photographs from the collection are available online, most of the images were scanned from damaged copies of the original prints. We present and evaluate a modified histogram matching technique based on the underlying chemistry of the prints for correcting the damaged images by using training data collected from a small set of undamaged prints. The entire set of color-adjusted Documerica images is made available in an open repository.