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.
Other CNN based approaches are combined with user interactions. For instance, Zhang al @cite_32 propose to train a deep network given the grayscale version and a set of sparse user inputs. This allows the user to have more than one plausible solution. Also, He al @cite_33 propose an exemplar-based colorization method using a deep learning approach. The colorization network jointly learns faithful local colorization to a meaningful reference and plausible color prediction when a reliable reference is unavailable.
@cite_32 @cite_33
2949359905 2809852002
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. 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.