A Dual Taxonomy for Defects in Digitized Historical Photos

Abstract

Old photos may be affected by several types of defects. Manual restorers use their own taxonomy to classify damages by which a photo is affected, in order to apply the proper restoration techniques for a specific defect. Once a photo is digitally acquired, defects become part of the image, and their aspect change. This paper wants to be a first attempt to correlate real defects of printed photos, and digital defects of their digitized versions. A dual taxonomy is proposed, for real and digital defects, and used to classify an image dataset, for a posteriori comparative study. Furthermore, a set of digital features is analyzed for digitized images, to identify which of them could be useful for an automatic inspection method.