Attentional Colorization Networks with Adaptive Group-Instance Normalization

Abstract

We propose a novel end-to-end image colorization framework which integrates attention mechanism and a learnable adaptive normalization function. In contrast to previous colorization methods that directly generate the whole image, we believe that the color of the significant area determines the quality of the colorized image. The attention mechanism uses the attention map which is obtained by the auxiliary classifier to guide our framework to produce more subtle content and visually pleasing color in salient visual regions. Furthermore, we apply Adaptive Group Instance Normalization (AGIN) function to promote our framework to generate vivid colorized images flexibly, under the circumstance that we consider colorization as a particular style transfer task. Experiments show that our model is superior to previous the state-of-the-art models in coloring foreground objects.