Preserving Artistic Heritage: A Comprehensive Review of Virtual Restoration Methods for Damaged Artworks

Restoration of damaged artwork is an important task to preserve the culture and history of humankind. Restoration of damaged artwork is a delicate, complex, and irreversible process that requires preserving the artist’s style and semantics while removing the damages from the artwork. Digital restoration of artworks can guide artists in physically restoring artworks. This paper groups the virtual artwork restoration methods into various categories: image processing, machine learning, encoder-decoder neural networks, and generative adversarial network-based methods. This paper discusses and analyses different restoration methods’ underlying merits and demerits. The category-wise review of various artwork restoration methods reveals that the generative adversarial network-based methods have attracted the attention of researchers in recent years for restoring damaged artworks. This paper describes datasets used for training and testing of artwork restoration methods and discusses various metrics used for performance evaluation of the artwork restoration methods. This paper compares the restoration results of various methods quantitatively using performance evaluation metrics and qualitatively using visual inspection of the results. Further, the paper also identifies research gaps, challenges, and future directions for research in this field. The proposed review aims to provide researchers with an important reference for working in the artwork restoration field.