GRAYSCALE IMAGE COLORIZATION USING A CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORK

Image coloration refers to adding plausible colors to a grayscale image or video. Image coloration has been used in many modern fields, including restoring old photographs, as well as reducing the time spent painting cartoons. In this paper, a method is proposed for colorizing grayscale images using a convolutional neural network. We propose an encoder-decoder model, adapting FusionNet to our purpose. A proper loss function is defined instead of the MSE loss function to suit the purpose of coloring. The proposed model was verified using the ImageNet dataset. We quantitatively compared several colorization models with ours, using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) metric. In addition, to qualitatively evaluate the results, our model was applied to images in the test dataset and compared to images applied to various other models. Finally, we applied our model to a selection of old black and white photographs.