Skip to main content
Log in

Grayscale images colorization with convolutional neural networks

  • Focus
  • Published:
Soft Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Previous approaches to the colorization of grayscale images rely on human manual labor and often produce desaturated results that are not likely to be true colorizations. Inspired by Matías Richart’s paper, we proposed an automatic approach based on deep neural networks to color the image in grayscale. We have studied several models, approaches and loss functions to understand the best practices for producing a plausible colorization. By noting that some loss functions work better than others, we used the VGG-16 CNN model based on the classification with the loss of cross-entropy. The experiment shows that our model can produce a plausible colorization.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Burn GC (1997) Museum of broadcast communications: the Encyclopedia of television. www.museum.tv/archives/etv/index.html. Accessed Oct 2018

  • Carpiat G, Hofmann M, Schölkopf B (2008a) Automatic image colorization via multimodal predictions. In: Proceedins of the 10th European conference on computer vision, pp 126–139

  • Charpiat G, Hofmann M, Schölkopf B (2008b) Automatic image colorization via multimodal predictions. In: Computer vision–ECCV 2008, vol 5304, pp 126–139

  • Cheng Z, Yang Q, Sheng B (2015) Deep colorization. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision, pp 415–423

  • Deshpande A, Rock J, Forsyth D (2015) Learning large-scale automatic image colorization. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision

  • Di Blasi G, Recupero D Refrorgiato (2003) Fast colorization of gray images. In: Proceedings of Eurographics Italian chapter, Miliano, Italy

  • Gupta RK, Chia AY-S, Rajan D, Ng ES, Zhiyong H (2012) Image colorization using similar images. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on multimedia. ACM, pp 369–378

  • Gustav L, Maire M, Shakhnarovich G (2016) Learning representations for automatic colorization. In: European conference on computer vision—ECCV 2016. Springer, pp 577–593

  • Hertzmann A, Jacobs CE, Oliver N, Curless B, Salesin DH (2001) Image analogies. In: Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, SIGGRAPH ‘01, pp 327–340

  • Horiuchi T (2004) Colorization algorithm using probabilistic relaxation. Image Vis Comput 22(3):197–202

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Iizuka S, Simo-Serra E, Ishikawa H (2016) Let there be color!: joint end-to-end learning of global and local image priors for automatic image colorization with simultaneous classification. ACM Trans Graph 35(4):110

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ioffe S, Szegedy C (2015) Batch normalization: accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift, CoRR. arXiv:1502.03167

  • Levin A, Lischinski D, Weiss Y (2004) Colorization using optimization. In: SIGGRAPH 04, Los Angeles, Califonia. Transactions on graphics (TOG). ACM Press, 23(3):689–694

  • Nies D, Ma Q, Ma L, Xiao S (2007) Optimization based grayscale image colorization. Pattern Recognit Lett 28(12):1445–1451

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reinhard E, Ashikhmin M, Gooch B, Shirley P (2001) Color transfer between images. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 21(5):34–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ryan D (2016) Automatic colorization. http://tinyclouds.org/colorize. Accessed Oct 2018

  • Sahay T, Choudhary A (2017) Automatic colorization of videos. University of Massachusetts, Amherst

    Google Scholar 

  • Simonyan K, Zisserman A (2014a) Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition, CoRR. arXiv:1409.1556

  • Simonyan K, Zisserman A (2014b) Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition. arXiv:1409.1556

  • Takahama T, Horiuchi T, Kotera H (2005) Improvement on colorization accuracy by partitioning algorithm in cielab color space. In: Advances in multimedia information processing- PCM 2004, 5th Pacific rim conference on multimedia, vol 3332. Springer, pp 794–801

  • Welsh T, Ashikhmin M, Mueller K (2002) Transferring color to grayscale image. ACM Trans Graph 21(3):277–280

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yatziv L, Sapiro G (2006) Fast image and video colorization using chrominance blending. IEEE Trans Image Process 15:1120–1129

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang R, Isola P, Efros AA (2016) Colorful image colorization. In: European conference on computer vision. Springer

Download references

Funding

This study was funded by the Emergency Management Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 61741412) and the Shanxi Basic Research Project (Grant Number 201801D121143).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jiancheng An.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

Author Jiancheng An declares that he has no conflict of interest. Author Kpeyiton Koffi Gagnon declares that he has no conflict of interest. Author Qingnan Shi declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Additional information

Communicated by L. Wang.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

An, J., Kpeyiton, K.G. & Shi, Q. Grayscale images colorization with convolutional neural networks. Soft Comput 24, 4751–4758 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-020-04711-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-020-04711-3

Keywords

Navigation