The motion picture is not only a theatrical art but also a vivid record of past life. Unfortunately, almost all color films made since 1953 are subject to fading that can be arrested only by storing prints at very low temperatures. The photochemical restoration of faded motion prints is impossible. Nowadays, the improvement of computer power let us expect digital restoration of motion pictures at acceptable rates.We present in this paper a semi-automatic technique to restore faded color image sequences which is an extension of our previous work. This method consists first in removing the side absorptions introduced by the scanning process, then choose a “reference image” from the sequence, adjust its colors and contrast then propagate the performed correction to the whole image sequence.
Majed Chambah, Bernard Besserer, "Digital Restoration of Faded Color Movies: A Four-Step Method" in Proc. IS&T 8th Color and Imaging Conf., 2000, pp 161 - 166, https://doi.org/10.2352/CIC.2000.8.1.art00030