The argument of the article comes from the rapid development of digital technology and the urgent need for the digital protection and restoration of traditional paper horse art. For this reason, this paper proposes a method of digital protection and restoration of traditional paper horse art based on graphics processing technology. The traditional paper horse art image is collected, the image is denoised using mean filtering, the paper horse image is decomposed in gray scale through spatial conversion, and then its double histogram equalization is processed to obtain the color-enhanced image. Combined with the convolutional image restoration strategy, the paper horse art is digitally displayed. The method of this paper can enhance the color of the paper horse art image and retain the original details, and at the same time, in terms of the clarity effect, the method of this paper improves the comparison method by 25.27%~339.39%. In addition, the method in this paper has better image restoration quality with subjective evaluation rating ≥ 4 and higher PSNR and SSIM. What’s more, the scores on the evaluation dimension of digital preservation and restoration effect ranged from 4.02 to 4.48, and the overall effect performance was relatively good.