ROMNet: Renovate the Old Memories

Renovating the memories in old photos is an intriguing research topic in computer vision fields. These legacy images often suffer from severe and commingled degradations such as cracks, noise, and color-fading, while lack of large-scale paired old photo datasets makes this restoration task very challenging. In this work, we present a novel reference-based end-to-end learning framework that can jointly repair and colorize the degraded legacy pictures. Specifically, the proposed framework consists of three modules: a restoration sub-network for degradation restoration, a similarity sub-network for color histogram matching and transfer, and a colorization subnet that learns to predict the chroma elements of the images conditioned on chromatic reference signals. The whole system takes advantage of the color histogram priors in a given reference image, which vastly reduces the dependency on large-scale training data. Apart from the proposed method, we also create, to our knowledge, the first public and real-world old photo dataset with paired ground truth for evaluating old photo restoration models, wherein each old photo is paired with a manually restored pristine image by PhotoShop experts. Our extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts both quantitatively and qualitatively.