Colorization
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_colorization#Digital_colorization>
refers to the process of adding color to black-and-white photographs. This
work was historically done by hand. These days, colorization is usually
done digitally, with the support of specialized tooling. But it is still
quite labor-intensive.
A forthcoming paper
<http://hi.cs.waseda.ac.jp/~iizuka/projects/colorization/en/> from
researchers at Waseda University of Japan have developed a method for
automatic image colorization using deep learning neural network. The
results are both impressive and easy to reproduce, as the authors have
published
their code <https://github.com/satoshiiizuka/siggraph2016_colorization> to
GitHub with a permissive license.
Someone has already taken this code and packaged it as a simple webapp,
available at
http://colorizr.io/ (NSFW). The webapp lets you upload
black-and-white pictures and colorizes them for you. (The site is currently
not safe for work because it displays a gallery of recent uploads. We know
how that goes.)
In this thread, let's discuss how this technology could be integrated with
the projects. Should we have a bot that can perform colorization on demand,
the way Rotatebot <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rotatebot> can
rotate images?