Scene guided colorization using neural networks

Abstract

This paper presents a novel, fully automatic method to grayscale images colorization using a scene guided neural network. In our proposed method, given a training set of both grayscale images and their corresponding color images, we first extract features of each grayscale pixel. These features, together with the corresponding RGB values of that pixel are input to train a colorization neural network for each given scene. To improve the performance of colorization, in both speed and results, we further classify the input and training images into different scene classes. We adopt a linear image classification method to generate a scene guided codebook and use it to determine the scene class of the input image. The preliminary colorization result is then generated by the corresponding trained neural network of the scene class of the input image. Finally, an image guided filter is used to refine colorized images. Inspired by the recent success in deep learning techniques which provide stabilizing modeling of large-scale medical image data, the proposed paper formulating the enhancement and colorization problem, so that colorization techniques can be directly used to ensure medical images with high quality. The experimental results on a broad range of images demonstrate that our method has better colorization performance as compared to that of the state-of-the-art algorithms.