A hardcopy backup and reconstruction system for digital images

Large amounts of images are captured every day and digital storage solutions are the most prevalent approach to preserve them. This paper proposes to augment the existing solutions with a modernized hardcopy backup, which can serve as a fall-back solution if everything else fails and can be enjoyed at the same time. In particular, the collection of images is printed in form of an inexpensive photo-album, which is augmented with printed human readable meta-information designed to enable an easy reconstruction of the the digital version of the original images. The methodology is illustrated using a set of digital sRGB images and printed simulations of faded versions of those images, which are scanned and reconstructed in an automatic and manual way and are compared to the results of a scanner reconstruction software and to the original images.