Colorizing the Prokudin-Gorskii Photo Collection

Ameya Chander

Project Introduction

Introduction: The goal of this project is to input these glass plate images from Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii and then combine it with our image processing techniques learned to produce a single colored image by extracting three color channels(r,g,b) and aligning them on each other to create a single colorized image.

Methods

Single Scale Alignment: My first method was doing single scale exhuastive search over (-15,15) displacements. Sum of Squared differences provided best metrics for the images. Additionally, cropping the image as well as aligning to the green channel rather than blue provided less bluriness in my images, and so I was able to align better images doing so.

Multi scale alignment: While single scale alignment worked well for smaller jpeg images, that was not the case for the larger tiff files. Image pyramids however allowed for us to find the best alignment faster because it would resize images by a smaller factor first, and then save time searching the larger pixel and then continuing to crop like I did in single scale exhuastive search, which gave me the best and fastest results overall.