Automated Colorization of a Grayscale Image With Seed Points Propagation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on multimedia 2020-07, Vol.22 (7), p.1756-1768
• Main Authors: Wan, Shaohua, Xia, Yu, Qi, Lianyong, Yang, Yee-Hong, Atiquzzaman, Mohammed
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Color imagery; Colorization; Cost function; Feature extraction; Gray scale; Image color analysis; Image filters; Image segmentation; Neural network; Neural networks; Optimization; Pixels; Propagation; Segmentation; Training
• ISSN: 1520-9210; 1941-0077
• DOI: 10.1109/TMM.2020.2976573

In this paper, we propose a fully automatic image colorization method for grayscale images using neural network and optimization. For a determined training set including the gray images and its corresponding color images, our method segments grayscale images into superpixels and then extracts features of particular points of interest in each superpixel. The obtained features and their RGB values are given as input for, the training colorization neural network of each pixel. To achieve a better image colorization effect in shorter running time, our method further propagates the resulting color points to neighboring pixels for improved colorization results. In the propagation of color, we present a cost function to formalize the premise that neighboring pixels should have the maximum positive similarity of intensities and colors; we then propose our solution to solving the optimization problem. At last, a guided image filter is employed to refine the colorized image. Experiments on a wide variety of images show that the proposed algorithms can achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art algorithms.