A Study on the Color Prediction of Ancient Chinese Architecture Paintings Based on a Digital Color Camera and the Color Design System

Abstract

Color paintings such as painted facades and interiors are important decoration elements of ancient Chinese architectures. The color of the paintings usually fades over time due to exposure to strong light, high humidity, high temperatures, and other environmental factors. In order to restore or reproduce the color appearance of ancient architecture paintings correctly, it was necessary to study the color degradation process of such paintings. To meet the needs of on-site colorimetric measurement of the paintings on ancient Chinese architectures, we propose using a digital color camera and the CDS (Color Design System) to measure and evaluate the colors of such paintings. The CDS is a color order system recommended by the Chinese national technical committee for color standardization (SAC/TC 120) in 2017 (GB/Z 35473-2017). The current version of the CDS atlas contains about 2740 samples which were uniformly distributed on the whole color space, and can be used to set up the colorimetric characterization model for the digital camera. Particularly, the digital CDS lookup table contains over 400 thousand samples, and it can be used to express the color of paintings on ancient Chinese architectures. In the experiment, a digital color camera was used to capture the colors of the paintings on the ancient Chinese architectures of different years based on the CDS and polynomial transform method. Moreover, a linear interpolation method was proposed for calculating and predicting the color degradation of such paintings. The experimental results show that with the increase in years, the color hue of the paintings changes slowly, while the lightness and the chroma of them fade obviously. In the future, more ancient architectures of different years and from different places should be selected as experimental samples to improve the method and the results of the paper.