Extraction and restoration of scratched murals based on hyperspectral imaging—a case study of murals in the East Wall of the sixth grotto of Yungang Grottoes, Datong, China

Abstract Restoring the murals' various kinds of deteriorations is urgently necessary given the growing awareness of the need to protect cultural relics. Virtual restoration starts with an accurate extraction of deterioration. It is challenging to precisely extract scratches from murals because of their intricate information. Hyperspectral images are used to accentuate scratches of mural in this paper. First, a technique for improving information was put forth that involved the transformation of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a high-pass filter. Second, by using multi-scale bottom hat transformation, Otsu threshold segmentation, and non-deterioration mask, the deterioration information was extracted from the enhanced result. Third, the morphological transformation and connected component analysis were used to denoise the extracted results. Additionally, the scratched image was repaired using an improved exemplar-based region filling method. The results of deterioration information under different enhancement methods were discussed, and the deterioration extraction method proposed in this paper was contrasted with other deterioration extraction methods. The extraction accuracy was greatly increased by the suggested method. Additionally, we assessed the accuracy of various virtual restoration techniques for image restoration and discovered that our suggested restoration method did a good job of maintaining the structural integrity of the mural's information.