LICENSE Agreement of BlueNeg Data Set version 1.0
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Dated: 2024-06-12
License document prepared by Tien-Tsin Wong

All photographs/negatives in this data set are owned and 
copyrighted by Tien-Tsin Wong.


Why BlueNeg?
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This set of images is collected for studying the research problem of 
restoring the corrupted negative films. Due to the physical nature of 
negative film, the red, green, and blue light-sensitive layers are 
located differently inside the negative film. Therefore, the rates of 
deterioration of these three layers are different. I found that the 
blue channel is relatively vulnerable compared to the other two channels.
Because the blue light-sensitive layer is on the outermost layer on 
the emulsion side. That is, the deterioration rates are heterogeneous.
This characteristic is inherited from its ancestor, i.e., storing the 
three color negatives (R, G, B) on three separate glass plates by 
Prokudin-Gorsky. 

Since the blue channel is more vulnerable and the other two channels 
are relatively well-preserved, this means we can restore the blue 
channel by exploiting the retained information from the red and green 
channels to restore the color photograph. This is especially sound with
the latest AI technologies. 

Unfortunately, most existing photo restoration techniques are 
developed based on printed photographs, in which the nature
of deterioration is different from that of the negatives. 
This is why I have scanned a collection of negatives I have shot
during 1980s to early 2000, for this research.


How to Obtain Permission?
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All photos are owned and copyrighted by Tien-Tsin Wong. You are 
automatically granted with permission to use the images for academic 
and commerical usages, provided that the image credit 
"Copyrighted by Tien-Tsin Wong" is included in any forms of 
publication, reproduction, redistribution, or derivatives of the images.

If you find the dataset is useful to you, please also cite our 
publication below in your work/publication. 

- Hanyuan Liu, Chengze Li, Minshan Xie, Zhenni Wang, Jiawen Liang, Chi-Sing Leung, and Tien-Tsin Wong,
  "BlueNeg: BlueNeg: A 35mm Negative Film Dataset for Restoring Channel-Heterogeneous Deterioration", 
  arXiv preprint, 2024.