On 04/05/16 05:21, Ori Livneh wrote:
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.
Impressive, yes, but with lots of ridiculous errors. For example, the ground often ends up green even when it's a road:
http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=cdcc0b2f-dc9e-4592-938b-b1146f75ecb5 http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=b868719e-b59a-42ed-ae9b-27f2a52fe246
Clothing is apparently always brown:
http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=a94e5ff7-25a1-4e61-b1be-b54f8301708d http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=3f5dadcb-912c-40fb-82fa-b52dde6d280b http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=687cb8e6-0031-443c-83b4-37d403a7fd34
Red is randomly splashed around with no apparent pattern:
http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=9567aab8-a94d-488d-a4b1-40b746649757 http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=3cce1ab2-b866-4ca6-b713-d7f49e392ab2 http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=d6d65eed-94e0-4a86-a772-057975d1a18c http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=debdc3f9-369b-494f-929d-5cf5a5b38712
Sometimes feature identification fails spectacularly:
http://colorizr.io/image.php?uuid=44d1c028-074d-4162-be65-4200569b89d2
Is it good enough for Wikipedia? Even the best examples have subtle defects.
Should we have a bot that can perform colorization on demand, the way Rotatebot https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rotatebot can rotate images?
Well, Rotatebot uploads images without review.
-- Tim Starling