Graphics and Media Lab CMC department, Lomonosov Moscow State University

Introduction

Colorization is a computer-assisted process of adding color to a monochrome image or a movie:

original black-and-white image	colorized image

The aim of this project was to create a fully interactive colorization algorithm, capable of real-time working with several megapixel images - a property, most currect algorithm do not possess.

Results

We have devised a colorization algorithm, based on GML GrowCut. A user just marks some pixels with desired colors and the algorithm automatically propagates indicated colors to the remainder of the image. Our algorithm, having not been specially optimized, colorises 1 megapixel image approximately in 15 seconds. The most important thing is that refining is almost instantaneous in contrast to other algorithms, which require the whole recomputation after even slightest refine.

Example

original black-and-white image	user-marked seeds
resulting color image	colorization process

The project team

• Vadim Konushin
• Vladimir Vezhnevets

Contacts

Please mail all comments, suggestions, problems and contributions:
vision [at] graphics [dot] cs [dot] msu [dot] ru