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Grayscale images colorization with convolutional neural networks

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Abstract

Previous approaches to the colorization of grayscale images rely on human manual labor and often produce desaturated results that are not likely to be true colorizations. Inspired by Matías Richart’s paper, we proposed an automatic approach based on deep neural networks to color the image in grayscale. We have studied several models, approaches and loss functions to understand the best practices for producing a plausible colorization. By noting that some loss functions work better than others, we used the VGG-16 CNN model based on the classification with the loss of cross-entropy. The experiment shows that our model can produce a plausible colorization.

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Funding

This study was funded by the Emergency Management Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 61741412) and the Shanxi Basic Research Project (Grant Number 201801D121143).

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Correspondence to Jiancheng An.

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Author Jiancheng An declares that he has no conflict of interest. Author Kpeyiton Koffi Gagnon declares that he has no conflict of interest. Author Qingnan Shi declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Communicated by L. Wang.

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An, J., Kpeyiton, K.G. & Shi, Q. Grayscale images colorization with convolutional neural networks. Soft Comput 24, 4751–4758 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-020-04711-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-020-04711-3

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