Learning Representations for Automatic Colorization

Gustav Larsson, Michael Maire, Gregory Shakhnarovich

Published 2016-03-22Version 1

We develop a fully automatic image colorization system. Our approach leverages recent advances in deep networks, exploiting both low-level and semantic representations during colorization. As many scene elements naturally appear according to multimodal color distributions, we train our model to predict per-pixel color histograms. This intermediate output can be used to automatically generate a color image, or further manipulated prior to image formation; our experiments consider both scenarios. On both fully and partially automatic colorization tasks, our system significantly outperforms all existing methods.