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[SIGGRAPH Asia 2021] Time-Travel Rephotography

<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.12261"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/arXiv-2008.00951-b31b1b.svg"></a> <a href="https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/License-MIT-yellow.svg"></a> Open in Colab

[Project Website]

<p align='center'> <img src="time-travel-rephotography.gif" width='100%'/> </p>

Many historical people were only ever captured by old, faded, black and white photos, that are distorted due to the limitations of early cameras and the passage of time. This paper simulates traveling back in time with a modern camera to rephotograph famous subjects. Unlike conventional image restoration filters which apply independent operations like denoising, colorization, and superresolution, we leverage the StyleGAN2 framework to project old photos into the space of modern high-resolution photos, achieving all of these effects in a unified framework. A unique challenge with this approach is retaining the identity and pose of the subject in the original photo, while discarding the many artifacts frequently seen in low-quality antique photos. Our comparisons to current state-of-the-art restoration filters show significant improvements and compelling results for a variety of important historical people. <br/>

Time-Travel Rephotography <br/> Xuan Luo, Xuaner Zhang, Paul Yoo, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Jason Lawrence, and Steven M. Seitz <br/> In SIGGRAPH Asia 2021.

Demo

We provide an easy-to-get-started demo using Google Colab! The Colab will allow you to try our method on the sample Abraham Lincoln photo or your own photos using Cloud GPUs on Google Colab.

Open in Colab

Or you can run our method on your own machine following the instructions below.

Prerequisite

Quick Start

Run our method on the example photo of Abraham Lincoln.

Run on Your Own Image

Historical Wiki Face Dataset

PathSizeDescription
Historical Wiki Face Dataset.zip148 MBImages
spectral_sensitivity.json6 KBSpectral sensitivity (b, gb, or g).
blur_radius.json6 KBBlur radius in pixels

The jsons are dictionares that map input names to the corresponding spectral sensitivity or blur radius. Due to copyright constraints, Historical Wiki Face Dataset.zip contains all images in the Historical Wiki Face Dataset that were used in our user study except the photo of Mao Zedong. You can download it separately and crop it as above.

Citation

If you find our code useful, please consider citing our paper:

@article{Luo-Rephotography-2021,
  author    = {Luo, Xuan and Zhang, Xuaner and Yoo, Paul and Martin-Brualla, Ricardo and Lawrence, Jason and Seitz, Steven M.},
  title     = {Time-Travel Rephotography},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2021)},
  publisher = {ACM New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {40},
  number = {6},
  articleno = {213},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3478513.3480485},
  year = {2021},
  month = {12}
}

License

This work is licensed under MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Codes for the StyleGAN2 model come from https://github.com/rosinality/stylegan2-pytorch.

Acknowledgments

We thank Nick Brandreth for capturing the dry plate photos. We thank Bo Zhang, Qingnan Fan, Roy Or-El, Aleksander Holynski and Keunhong Park for insightful advice. We thank Xiaojie Feng for his contributions on the colab demo.