Example-based image colorization using locality consistent sparse representation

Li, Bo, Zhao, Fuchen, Su, Zhuo, Liang, Xiangguo, Lai, Yukun ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2094-5680 and Rosin, Paul L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4965-3884 2017. Example-based image colorization using locality consistent sparse representation. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 26 (11) , pp. 516-525. 10.1109/TIP.2017.2732239

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Abstract

—Image colorization aims to produce a natural looking color image from a given grayscale image, which remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel examplebased image colorization method exploiting a new locality consistent sparse representation. Given a single reference color image, our method automatically colorizes the target grayscale image by sparse pursuit. For efficiency and robustness, our method operates at the superpixel level. We extract low-level intensity features, mid-level texture features and high-level semantic features for each superpixel, which are then concatenated to form its descriptor. The collection of feature vectors for all the superpixels from the reference image composes the dictionary. We formulate colorization of target superpixels as a dictionary-based sparse reconstruction problem. Inspired by the observation that superpixels with similar spatial location and/or feature representation are likely to match spatially close regions from the reference image, we further introduce a locality promoting regularization term into the energy formulation which substantially improves the matching consistency and subsequent colorization results. Target superpixels are colorized based on the chrominance information from the dominant reference superpixels. Finally, to further improve coherence while preserving sharpness, we develop a new edge-preserving filter for chrominance channels with the guidance from the target grayscale image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on sparse pursuit image colorization from single reference images. Experimental results demonstrate that our colorization method outperforms state-ofthe-art methods, both visually and quantitatively using a user study

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ISSN:	1057-7149
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	21 July 2017
Date of Acceptance:	14 July 2017
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 19:03
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/102840

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