The colorization of grayscale images is an ill-posed problem, with multiple correct solutions. In this paper, an adversarial learning approach is proposed. A generator network is used to infer the chromaticity of a given grayscale image. The same network also performs a semantic classification of the image. This network is framed in an adversarial model that learns to colorize by incorporating perceptual and semantic understanding of color and class distributions. The model is trained via a fully self-supervised strategy. Qualitative and quantitative results show the capacity of the proposed method to colorize images in a realistic way, achieving top-tier performances relative to the state-of-the-art.
Zhang al @cite_12 learn the color distribution of every pixel and infer the colorization from the learnt distribution. The network is trained with a multinomial cross entropy loss with rebalanced rare classes allowing for rare colors to appear in the colorized image. In a similar spirit, Larsson al @cite_1 train a deep CNN to learn per-pixel color histograms. They use a VGG network in order to interpret the semantic composition of the scene as well as the localization of objects and then predict the color histograms of every pixel based on this interpretation. They train the network with the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Again, the colorization is inferred from the color histrograms.
@cite_1 @cite_12
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We develop a fully automatic image colorization system. Our approach leverages recent advances in deep networks, exploiting both low-level and semantic representations. As many scene elements naturally appear according to multimodal color distributions, we train our model to predict per-pixel color histograms. This intermediate output can be used to automatically generate a color image, or further manipulated prior to image formation. On both fully and partially automatic colorization tasks, we outperform existing methods. We also explore colorization as a vehicle for self-supervised visual representation learning. Color constancy is the recovery of true surface color from observed color, and requires estimating the chromaticity of scene illumination to correct for the bias it induces. In this paper, we show that the per-pixel color statistics of natural scenes—without any spatial or semantic context—can by themselves be a powerful cue for color constancy. Specifically, we describe an illuminant estimation method that is built around a "classifier" for identifying the true chromaticity of a pixel given its luminance (absolute brightness across color channels). During inference, each pixel's observed color restricts its true chromaticity to those values that can be explained by one of a candidate set of illuminants, and applying the classifier over these values yields a distribution over the corresponding illuminants. A global estimate for the scene illuminant is computed through a simple aggregation of these distributions across all pixels. We begin by simply defining the luminance-to-chromaticity classifier by computing empirical histograms over discretized chromaticity and luminance values from a training set of natural images. These histograms reflect a preference for hues corresponding to smooth reflectance functions, and for achromatic colors in brighter pixels. Despite its simplicity, the resulting estimation algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art color constancy methods. Next, we propose a method to learn the luminance-to-chromaticity classifier "end-to-end". Using stochastic gradient descent, we set chromaticity-luminance likelihoods to minimize errors in the final scene illuminant estimates on a training set. This leads to further improvements in accuracy, most significantly in the tail of the error distribution. Recent progress on many imaging and vision tasks has been driven by the use of deep feed-forward neural networks, which are trained by propagating gradients of a loss defined on the final output, back through the network up to the first layer that operates directly on the image. We propose back-propagating one step further---to learn camera sensor designs jointly with networks that carry out inference on the images they capture. In this paper, we specifically consider the design and inference problems in a typical color camera---where the sensor is able to measure only one color channel at each pixel location, and computational inference is required to reconstruct a full color image. We learn the camera sensor's color multiplexing pattern by encoding it as layer whose learnable weights determine which color channel, from among a fixed set, will be measured at each location. These weights are jointly trained with those of a reconstruction network that operates on the corresponding sensor measurements to produce a full color image. Our network achieves significant improvements in accuracy over the traditional Bayer pattern used in most color cameras. It automatically learns to employ a sparse color measurement approach similar to that of a recent design, and moreover, improves upon that design by learning an optimal layout for these measurements. A novel color image histogram equalization approach is proposed that exploits the correlation between color components and it is enhanced by a multi-level smoothing technique borrowed from statistical language engineering. Multi-level smoothing aims at dealing efficiently with the problem of unseen color values, either considered independently or in combination with others. It is applied here to the HSI color space for the probability of intensity and the probability of saturation given the intensity, while the hue is left unchanged. Moreover, the proposed approach is extended by an empirical technique, which is based on a hue preserving non-linear transformation, in order to eliminate the gamut problem. This is the second method proposed in the paper. The equalized images by the two methods are compared to those produced by other well-known methods. The better quality of the images equalized by the proposed methods is judged in terms of their visual appeal and objective figures of merit, such as the entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence estimates between the resulting color histogram and the multivariate uniform probability density function. We propose an automatic approach to soft color segmentation, which produces soft color segments with an appropriate amount of overlapping and transparency essential to synthesizing natural images for a wide range of image-based applications. Although many state-of-the-art and complex techniques are excellent at partitioning an input image to facilitate deriving a semantic description of the scene, to achieve seamless image synthesis, we advocate a segmentation approach designed to maintain spatial and color coherence among soft segments while preserving discontinuities by assigning to each pixel a set of soft labels corresponding to their respective color distributions. We optimize a global objective function, which simultaneously exploits the reliability given by global color statistics and flexibility of local image compositing, leading to an image model where the global color statistics of an image is represented by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), whereas the color of a pixel is explained by a local color mixture model where the weights are defined by the soft labels to the elements of the converged GMM. Transparency is naturally introduced in our probabilistic framework, which infers an optimal mixture of colors at an image pixel. To adequately consider global and local information in the same framework, an alternating optimization scheme is proposed to iteratively solve for the global and local model parameters. Our method is fully automatic and is shown to converge to a good optimal solution. We perform extensive evaluation and comparison and demonstrate that our method achieves good image synthesis results for image-based applications such as image matting, color transfer, image deblurring, and image colorization. It is shown that the color histogram has an even closer relationship to scene properties than has been previously described. Color histograms have identifiable features that relate in a precise mathematical way to scene properties. Object color and illumination color are the most obvious properties that are related to color distribution, and their extraction has already been described. It is shown here that the histogram of color variation may be further exploited to relate its shape to surface roughness and imaging geometry. An understanding of these features allows an improved estimate of illumination color and object color to be made. > This paper presents a novel image feature representation method, namely color difference histograms (CDH), for image retrieval. This method is entirely different from the existing histograms; most of the existing histogram techniques merely count the number or frequency of pixels. However, the unique characteristic of CDHs is that they count the perceptually uniform color difference between two points under different backgrounds with regard to colors and edge orientations in L*a*b* color space. This method pays more attention to color, edge orientation and perceptually uniform color differences, and encodes color, orientation and perceptually uniform color difference via feature representation in a similar manner to the human visual system. The method can be considered as a novel visual attribute descriptor combining edge orientation, color and perceptually uniform color difference, as well as taking the spatial layout into account without any image segmentation, learning processes or clustering implementation. Experimental results demonstrate that it is much more efficient than the existing image feature descriptors that were originally developed for content-based image retrieval, such as MPEG-7 edge histogram descriptors, color autocorrelograms and multi-texton histograms. It has a strong discriminative power using the color, texture and shape features while accounting for spatial layout. We present new methods which transfer the color style of a source image into an arbitrary given target image having a different 3D color distribution. The color transfer has a high importance ensuring a wide area of applications from artistic transformation of the color atmosphere of images until different scientific visualizations using special gamut mappings. Our technique use a permissive, or optionally strict, 3D histogram matching, similarly to the sampling of multivariable functions applying a sequential chain of conditional probability density functions. We work by order of hue, hue dependent lightness and from both dependent saturation histograms of source and target images, respectively. We apply different histogram transformations, like smoothing or contrast limitation, in order to avoid some unexpected high gradients and other artifacts. Furthermore, we use dominance suppression optionally, by applying sub-linear functions for the histograms in order to get well balanced color distributions, or an overall appearance reflecting the memory color distribution better. Forward and inverse operations on the corresponding cumulative histograms ensure a continuous mapping of perceptual attributes correlating to limited derivatives. Sampling an appropriate fraction of the pixels and using perceptually accurate and continuous histograms with minimal size as well as other gems make this method robust and fast. We address the problem of regional color transfer between two natural images by probabilistic segmentation. We use a new expectation-maximization (EM) scheme to impose both spatial and color smoothness to infer natural connectivity among pixels. Unlike previous work, our method takes local color information into consideration, and segment image with soft region boundaries for seamless color transfer and compositing. Our modified EM method has two advantages in color manipulation: first, subject to different levels of color smoothness in image space, our algorithm produces an optimal number of regions upon convergence, where the color statistics in each region can be adequately characterized by a component of a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Second, we allow a pixel to fall in several regions according to our estimated probability distribution in the EM step, resulting in a transparency-like ratio for compositing different regions seamlessly. Hence, natural color transition across regions can be achieved, where the necessary intra-region and inter-region smoothness are enforced without losing original details. We demonstrate results on a variety of applications including image deblurring, enhanced color transfer, and colorizing gray scale images. Comparisons with previous methods are also presented. We propose a deep learning approach for user-guided image colorization. The system directly maps a grayscale image, along with sparse, local user "hints" to an output colorization with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Rather than using hand-defined rules, the network propagates user edits by fusing low-level cues along with high-level semantic information, learned from large-scale data. We train on a million images, with simulated user inputs. To guide the user towards efficient input selection, the system recommends likely colors based on the input image and current user inputs. The colorization is performed in a single feed-forward pass, enabling real-time use. Even with randomly simulated user inputs, we show that the proposed system helps novice users quickly create realistic colorizations, and offers large improvements in colorization quality with just a minute of use. In addition, we demonstrate that the framework can incorporate other user "hints" to the desired colorization, showing an application to color histogram transfer. Our code and models are available at this https URL This paper describes an approach to perceptual segmentation of color image textures. A multiscale representation of the texture image, generated by a multiband smoothing algorithm based on human psychophysical measurements of color appearance is used as the input. Initial segmentation is achieved by applying a clustering algorithm to the image at the coarsest level of smoothing. The segmented clusters are then restructured in order to isolate core clusters, i.e., patches in which the pixels are definitely associated with the same region. The image pixels representing the core clusters are used to form 3D color histograms which are then used for probabilistic assignment of all other pixels to the core clusters to form larger clusters and categorise the rest of the image. The process of setting up color histograms and probabilistic reassignment of the pixels to the clusters is then propagated through finer levels of smoothing until a full segmentation is achieved at the highest level of resolution. For grey-value images, it is well accepted that the neighborhood rather than the pixel carries the geometrical interpretation. Interestingly the spatial configuration of the neighborhood is the basis for the perception of humans. Common practise in color image processing, is to use the color information without considering the spatial structure. We aim at a physical basis for the local interpretation of color images. We propose a framework for spatial color measurement, based on the Gaussian scale-space theory. We consider a Gaussian color model, which inherently uses the spatial and color information in an integrated model. The framework is well-founded in physics as well as in measurement science. The framework delivers sound and robust spatial color invariant features. The usefulness of the proposed measurement framework is illustrated by edge detection, where edges are discriminated as shadow, highlight, or object boundary. Other applications of the framework include color invariant image retrieval and color constant edge detection. This work presents a study of three important issues of the color pixel classification approach to skin segmentation: color representation, color quantization, and classification algorithm. Our analysis of several representative color spaces using the Bayesian classifier with the histogram technique shows that skin segmentation based on color pixel classification is largely unaffected by the choice of the color space. However, segmentation performance degrades when only chrominance channels are used in classification. Furthermore, we find that color quantization can be as low as 64 bins per channel, although higher histogram sizes give better segmentation performance. The Bayesian classifier with the histogram technique and the multilayer perceptron classifier are found to perform better compared to other tested classifiers, including three piecewise linear classifiers, three unimodal Gaussian classifiers, and a Gaussian mixture classifier. The existence of large image datasets such as photos on the World Wide Web make it possible to build powerful generic models for low-level image attributes like color using simple histogram learning techniques. We describe the construction of color models for skin and non-skin classes from a dataset of nearly 1 billion labeled pixels. These classes exhibit a surprising degree of separability which we exploit by building a skin pixel detector that achieves an equal error rate of 88 . We compare the performance of histogram and mixture models in skin detection and find histogram models to be superior in accuracy and computational cost. Using aggregate features computed from the skin detector we build a remarkably effective detector for naked people. We believe this work is the most comprehensive and detailed exploration of skin color models to date. We describe an automated method for image colorization that learns to colorize from examples. Our method exploits a LEARCH framework to train a quadratic objective function in the chromaticity maps, comparable to a Gaussian random field. The coefficients of the objective function are conditioned on image features, using a random forest. The objective function admits correlations on long spatial scales, and can control spatial error in the colorization of the image. Images are then colorized by minimizing this objective function. We demonstrate that our method strongly outperforms a natural baseline on large-scale experiments with images of real scenes using a demanding loss function. We demonstrate that learning a model that is conditioned on scene produces improved results. We show how to incorporate a desired color histogram into the objective function, and that doing so can lead to further improvements in results. Most digital cameras capture one primary color at each pixel by a single sensor overlaid with a color filter array. To recover a full color image from incomplete color samples, one needs to restore the two missing color values for each pixel. This restoration process is known as color demosaicking. In this paper, we present a novel self-learning approach to this problem via support vector regression. Unlike prior learning-based demosaicking methods, our approach aims at extracting image-dependent information in constructing the learning model, and we do not require any additional training data. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art techniques in both subjective and objective image quality measures. People interpret abstract meanings from colors, which makes color a useful perceptual feature for visual communication. This process is complicated, however, because there is seldom a one-to-one correspondence between colors and meanings. One color can be associated with many different concepts (one-to-many mapping) and many colors can be associated with the same concept (many-to-one mapping). We propose that to interpret color-coding systems, people perform assignment inference to determine how colors map onto concepts. We studied assignment inference in the domain of recycling. Participants saw images of colored but unlabeled bins and were asked to indicate which bins they would use to discard different kinds of recyclables and trash. In Experiment 1, we tested two hypotheses for how people perform assignment inference. The local assignment hypothesis predicts that people simply match objects with their most strongly associated color. The global assignment hypothesis predicts that people also account for the association strengths between all other objects and colors within the scope of the color-coding system. Participants discarded objects in bins that optimized the color-object associations of the entire set, which is consistent with the global assignment hypothesis. This sometimes resulted in discarding objects in bins whose colors were weakly associated with the object, even when there was a stronger associated option available. In Experiment 2, we tested different methods for encoding color-coding systems and found that people were better at assignment inference when color sets simultaneously maximized the association strength between assigned color-object parings while minimizing associations between unassigned pairings. Our study provides an approach for designing intuitive color-coding systems that facilitate communication through visual media such as graphs, maps, signs, and artifacts. Colorization is an ambiguous problem, with multiple viable colorizations for a single grey-level image. However, previous methods only produce the single most probable colorization. Our goal is to model the diversity intrinsic to the problem of colorization and produce multiple colorizations that display long-scale spatial co-ordination. We learn a low dimensional embedding of color fields using a variational autoencoder (VAE). We construct loss terms for the VAE decoder that avoid blurry outputs and take into account the uneven distribution of pixel colors. Finally, we build a conditional model for the multi-modal distribution between grey-level image and the color field embeddings. Samples from this conditional model result in diverse colorization. We demonstrate that our method obtains better diverse colorizations than a standard conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) model, as well as a recently proposed conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). Early detection of malignant melanoma can be lifesaving (1–3) and may be aided by digital image analysis (4–10). Certain colors are associated with melanoma in dermoscopy images, including blue and gray in veil structures, dark gray, blue and black in peppering associated with regression, white in scar-like regression, erythema associated with inflammation, brown in dots, globules and blotches as well as the pigment network, and black in dots (11, 12). Automatic detection of colors in clinical images (13–18) and dermoscopy images (5, 6, 19) using a number of techniques has been presented, but delineation of the range of benign vs. malignant coloring in digital dermoscopy images has not previously been attempted. In previous research, a data-driven relative color histogram analysis technique was examined for determining colors characteristic of melanomas in clinical images (16, 17). The use of relative color (13), in which the background color is subtracted from the image color, has been proposed as a technique to avoid color distortion in the imaging process as well as a method of accounting for variations in normal skin color. This research presents the relative color histogram technique that is applied to discrimination of benign and malignant colors in dermoscopy images. An overview of the color feature analysis algorithm used in the present study is presented in Fig. 1. Experiments presented here compare detection of clustered colors, as seen in the dermoscopy image lesion structures listed above, with detection of colors without regard to structure. Additional experiments are performed to evaluate the histogram analysis technique based on diagnostic accuracy achieved with: (1) different numbers of lesion images used as training data to identify melanoma colors and (2) different areas of the lesion selected for color analysis. Fig. 1 Overview of algorithm for color feature calculations and lesion discrimination. The remaining sections of this paper include: (1) the techniques used to calculate the percent melanoma color and color clustering ratio features, (2) experiments performed for melanoma and benign lesion discrimination, (3) experimental results, (4) discussion, and (5) conclusions from the study. Given a grayscale photograph as input, this paper attacks the problem of hallucinating a plausible color version of the photograph. This problem is clearly underconstrained, so previous approaches have either relied on significant user interaction or resulted in desaturated colorizations. We propose a fully automatic approach that produces vibrant and realistic colorizations. We embrace the underlying uncertainty of the problem by posing it as a classification task and use class-rebalancing at training time to increase the diversity of colors in the result. The system is implemented as a feed-forward pass in a CNN at test time and is trained on over a million color images. We evaluate our algorithm using a “colorization Turing test,” asking human participants to choose between a generated and ground truth color image. Our method successfully fools humans on 32 of the trials, significantly higher than previous methods. Moreover, we show that colorization can be a powerful pretext task for self-supervised feature learning, acting as a cross-channel encoder. This approach results in state-of-the-art performance on several feature learning benchmarks.