International Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Over time, the colors in old Tangka paintings can fade due to various factors, including exposure to light, air pollution, humidity, and dust deposition. Interestingly, the frame acts as a physical barrier between the artwork and its surroundings, offering some protection against the harmful factors that contribute to color fading. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to recover the faded colors of Tangka paintings by leveraging the visual cues provided by the frame-covered area. Our method involves the development of an interactive annotation pipeline and the utilization of histogram matching for color restoration. We applied this approach to faded, aged Tangka paintings in Palace Museum’s collection and achieved visually plausible color recovery, even for intricate patterns that are challenging to restore manually. Full article