White-balancing algorithms in colour photograph restoration

Digital preservation and restoration of photographic materials has recently been attracting some attention from the computer science community. One particular area of interest is restoration of faded colour in photographs and slides. This paper examines the applicability of some of the existing colour-manipulation algorithms to this area. The algorithms are evaluated in two ways: first, they are used to restore synthetically degraded data and the results are compared using a colour distance measure against ground truth data; second, their performance is evaluated subjectively (visually) on digitized historical faded slides.