LABFNet: A Restoration Network Guided by the LAB Colour Space and Frequency-Domain Constraints

In the restoration of mural images with rich colour information and complex texture structures, existing techniques typically extract the spatial-domain features in the Red–Green–Blue (RGB) colour space. However, the three RGB channels are physically decoupled without unified perceptual colour correlation constraints, which often leads to noticeable colour deviation in damaged regions with large colour variations. In addition, restoring both high-frequency texture details and low-frequency global structures in a mixed-frequency spatial domain can create conflicts between frequencies, making it difficult to generate realistic high-frequency details. To address these issues, we propose the laboratory frequency network (LABFNet), a restoration network guided by the laboratory (LAB) colour space and frequency-domain constraints. Our model has two key improvements: (1) it incorporates colour parameters from the LAB space to model colour loss in murals, and (2) it decomposes the image into low- and high-frequency components and enforces frequency consistency during restoration. In the Dunhuang 20–40% mask-ratio setting, the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) improved by 1.58% and 0.27%, respectively, while the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) and CIEDE2000 decreased by 5.87%, 6.5%, and 21.65%, respectively. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that LABFNet reduces colour deviation and structural defects.