Colorizing the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection
Project 1

In the early years of the 1900s, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was not satisfied with the world being captured in black and white, as had been the standard for the past 80 years. He knew that there must be a way to capture the world as we see it, in color. His solution was to take three consecutive black-and-white photographs, one through a blue filter, one through a red filter, and one through a green filter. After proving his technique was possible, he contacted Tsar Nicholas II with an ambitious goal to document the Russian Empire, mainly for the benefit of school children being able to see their great nations wonders. He traveled all over the Empire from 1909 to 1915 taking photos of people, landmarks, machines, landscapes, art, and buildings. Some have estimated his collection to have numbered 3500 negatives at the end of his quest. He eventually left Russia, and in the process many images were taken by the government under the premise of national wartime security. A few years after his death, the Library of Congress purchased the surviving glass plates, around 1900 negatives, and started the process of preserving these significant windows in to a time long past. The Library of Congress has made scans of the original photographs available to anyone interested in the collection. This is where we come in.

The purpose of our assignment is to develop a program to assemble the pictures from the Prokudin-Gorskii collection. These programs will display and develop our use of image processing techniques, and our ability to code in MatLab. The process will include separating the 3 color channel images from the source, aligning them on top of each other to form a full color picture, and then perform any sort of enhancements that we deem necessary (or possible). The output will be an assortment of color photos of the way Sergei saw his homeland.

For further reading:
The Original Project Description.
The Library of Congress Page dedicated to Prokudin-Gorskii's Collection
The Wikipedia Entry for Prokudin-Gorskii