A Novel Picture Coding Using Colorization Technique

Abstract

Colorization is a computerized process of adding color to a black and white print, movie and TV program. The authors have proposed automatic colorization algorithms by giving a partial color to a monochrome image. This paper focuses on the colorization process which can produce a color image from a monochrome image with a small number of color pixels, and proposes a novel color image coding algorithm based on the colorization technique. At first, luminance component is separated from an input color image. Next, selected color seeds from the original color image are sown on the luminance image domain automatically and the monochrome image is colorized. The sowing process is continued until the colorized image satisfies the desired quality. Finally, both orthogonal transform-coded luminance component and the set of color seeds are transmitted as coded data. The decoding can be performed by tracing the same colorization process. We confirmed that the colorization technique is effective to image coding through the experiments.