# ROMNet: Renovate the Old Memories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02606 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02606/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [EnlightenGAN: Deep Light Enhancement without Paired Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06972/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03264/) (2017)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [UNet 3+: A Full-Scale Connected UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08790/) (2020)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [Learning Representations for Automatic Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06668/) (2016)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10477/) (2018)
- [Learning a Convolutional Neural Network for Non-uniform Motion Blur Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00593/) (2015)
- [Real-Time User-Guided Image Colorization with Learned Deep Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02999/) (2017)
- [Bringing Old Photos Back to Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09484/) (2020)
- [Deep Exemplar-based Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06587/) (2018)
- [Instance-aware Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10825/) (2020)
- [Deep Exemplar-based Video Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09909/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.