Colorizing Images and Video by Scribbling

Guspaz writes "Up until now, colorizing a video or image has been a painstaking and mostly manual task. However, researchers in Israel have come up with a new way of colorizing images just by making a few scribbles. The technique works on the premise that 'neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors,' and also allows colorization of videos by 'marking' about one in ten frames."

Photoshop

[FoXDie]

Personally I can't wait until there is a Photoshop filter for this. :D

TBS!

[Reignking]

I wonder if the actual quality will improve, though -- colorized films still look, well, colorized. You can tell in 1 second...

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[kotku]

Video Compression !

Only save the intensity channel and a few bits of markup and you compress the stream quite a bit.

Awesome!

[JesusCigarettes]

Now it's even easier for corporations re-releasing films to completely destroy the original beauty of a film by adding unnatural and unnecessary color!

Coming soon, new dubbing techniques will allow easy substitution of the original actors' voices and dialogue with trite teen-angst to appeal to younger generations.

Unfuckingbelievable.

[syukton]

Their site is going to get slashdotted real quick. Lots of content on there. It's beautiful. It's ... it's amazing what they've done with so little effort.

I am so curious what this could do for so many old movies...

Re:Awesome!

[mzwaterski]

Then don't watch the re-released version. I mean come on, of all things to complain about. "Some company has the ability to change something I like into a form that other people will like."

Wont Work

[Anonymous Coward]

Have done colorization of house and home interiors for years. Try this algorithm on the siding of an all white house and it'll get confused real quick with window and door trim especially in spots where there are no shadows due to angle of sun. Good 75% solution.

Re:Unfuckingbelievable.

[Issue9mm]

I don't necessarily believe that old black and white movies are good BECAUSE they are black and white. Granted, a lot of "colorized" movies look like crap, and I'll also grant you that a lot of black and white movies are good. I think that the correlation between the two is probably imagined. Colorizing a good movie doesn't necessarily lessen the movie, and can add considerably to it I'd say. The act of adding color (if done well), by itself, is not going to ruin the movie, in my opinion. Adding color, and doing it poorly could, but that's neither here nor there.

-9mm-

Re:Not a new concept

[James McP]

I think the "break through" in this process is that it works over a series of frames automatically rather than requiring each frame to be manipulated. It was my uneducated understanding that colorization tended to be a frame-by-frame process.

If this can cut the work down to 1/10th normal it becomes plausible for the general public. While I'm no budding spielburg, I know a lot of people who might want to touch up the color quality of their wedding video.

Tech Geeks vs. Film Purists

[venomkid]

You b/w film purists. If all you can see is a threat to your bizarre, luddite idea of what film should be, you need to get your heads checked, or at least you need to listen to your inner geek. Stop using these folks' achievement as an opportunity for chest-thumping.

The idea that one could color correct video with a few strokes from mspaint is staggering. Imagine if one could do this to color video, in real time... you could color-highlight an object and the computer could follow it without sensors or other pre-implanted devices, and that's not even a particularly original idea. This is awesome technology with applications probably well beyond what we see here.

Re:Ummmmm

[clarkcox3]

My Emphasis added:

Neighboring pixels in

space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors.

Flood fill would be described as:

Neighboring pixels in

space that have similar intensities should have the same colors.

See the differences? They are important.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have mistaken the Gimp for a program with usability.

Re:Unfuckingbelievable.

[thatnerdguy]

The director didn't add colour because he probably couldn't! The question is would he have wanted to see the movie in colour if available?

Realtime

[phorm]

I could see this working best as a "realtime" colour filter, especially if you're using a pen or something similar. Scratch near a border and view the result... if it goes a bit beyond where you want scratch on the other side of the border. If it's not quite enough lengthen your scratch.

I wonder how much CPU power is required, if you could do this realtime or close to it would be quite awesome, but having to make your scratches and click "apply filter" then wait for 30 seconds would not be nearly as useful/efficient.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

No, since Photoshop is immensely better than The GIMP, from both a functional and aesthetic viewpoint.

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[TheGavster]

What a brilliant plan! What if we were to take groupings of four pixels, store luminance for each and an average of their red and blue weights, netting a savings of:

uncompressed: 24 bits per pixel X 4 pixels = 72 bits
compressed: 8 luminance bits X 4 pixels + 8 Red bits + 8 V bits = 48 bits

100 - (48 / 72 * 100) = 33.3%!

Wait ... this sounds an aweful lot like the YUV encoding used in MPEG compression ... probably has something to do with it actually being the YUV encoding used in MPEG compression.

They could use this in science fiction shows...

[Brand X]

For example, on Farscape, given Virginia Hey's problems with makeup and contact lenses... heck, any of these humanoids-with-funny-skin-color shows would benefit from not having to put in the hours upon hours of makeup. Instead, we'd see hours upon hours of post-production...

Blurs? Fine background detail? Motion?

[dpbsmith]

In the days when colorized videos of black-and-white films were common, I watched a few. The so-called "colorization" had some very serious problems, and I wonder whether this new method addresses them.

The problems tended to be in the background, and they probably thought people's attention would stay on the foreground, but I think like many things in film you notice them subconsciously. Either the background is out of focus, in which case there are no sharp edges for the colorization to work on, or it contains a basically infinite quantity of detail as the background gets farther and farther way. Either way, it was extremely common to see uncolored areas in the background.

It was fairly common to see black-and-white paintings hanging on walls, for example. The walls would be some fairly uniform wash of plausible wall color, but nobody was going to take the time to handcolor the paintings hanging on them.

A similar problem concerned scenes with machinery in them, or anything with lots of complex, detailed motion (so that successive frames weren't similar). Thus, you'd see black-and-white printing presses operating in a colorized newspaper building...

In addition, the fact that the colorized faces, for example, were a uniformly colored wash, rather than varying in color as well as brightness, created a subtle kind of phoniness. To me, the result was the conveyance of a sort of emotional coldness. The colorized movies looked colored, but they didn't feel colored.

The exact opposite of the kind of lift you couldn't help feeling in the fifties when you saw a Technicolor spectacular--in the days when "Technicolor" meant that by golly you were watching genuine dye-imbibation prints from real color separations. Sweet as candy, but irresistable. (The effect does come through in the best DVD restorations).