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Let there be color!: joint end-to-end learning of global and local image priors for automatic image colorization with simultaneous classification

Published: 11 July 2016 Publication History

Abstract

We present a novel technique to automatically colorize grayscale images that combines both global priors and local image features. Based on Convolutional Neural Networks, our deep network features a fusion layer that allows us to elegantly merge local information dependent on small image patches with global priors computed using the entire image. The entire framework, including the global and local priors as well as the colorization model, is trained in an end-to-end fashion. Furthermore, our architecture can process images of any resolution, unlike most existing approaches based on CNN. We leverage an existing large-scale scene classification database to train our model, exploiting the class labels of the dataset to more efficiently and discriminatively learn the global priors. We validate our approach with a user study and compare against the state of the art, where we show significant improvements. Furthermore, we demonstrate our method extensively on many different types of images, including black-and-white photography from over a hundred years ago, and show realistic colorizations.

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  1. Let there be color!: joint end-to-end learning of global and local image priors for automatic image colorization with simultaneous classification

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      cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
      ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 35, Issue 4
      July 2016
      1396 pages
      ISSN:0730-0301
      EISSN:1557-7368
      DOI:10.1145/2897824
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Publication History

      Published: 11 July 2016
      Published in TOG Volume 35, Issue 4

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      Author Tags

      1. colorization
      2. convolutional neural network

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      • (2025)Enhancing NetVLAD Based localization with Gaussian Splat2025 IEEE 23rd World Symposium on Applied Machine Intelligence and Informatics (SAMI)10.1109/SAMI63904.2025.10883320(000359-000364)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
      • (2025)SEMACOL: Semantic-enhanced multi-scale approach for text-guided grayscale image colorizationPattern Recognition10.1016/j.patcog.2024.111203160(111203)Online publication date: Apr-2025
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