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Show HN: Open source colorizing grayscale images with NN
- leichtgewicht 10y agoI think this was on HackerNews before?
- astrosi 10y agoAre you thinking of this project instead? http://richzhang.github.io/colorization/ http://richzhang.github.io/colorization/
- liotier 10y agoYes - how do those two projects differ in their approach ?
- landmark2 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10864801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10864801
- leichtgewicht 10y agoThanks, I think that is what I meant.
- mosselman 10y agoCan I try this out in images myself somehow?
- taneq 10y agoI love the last one. "But you didn't say what colour it was, so I made it a red truck."
- LoSboccacc 10y agoAlso the lighthouse's sky: "That's sky, it's surely blue!" Generally it's interesting to see nn thinking out missing details. I'd like to see images with an element deleted and a nn filling in black spots to see what level of shape recognition could do.
- Coincoin 10y agoI'm pretty sure if you asked a group of humans to colorize the lighthouse you would probably get the same result. There is no way, from the greyscale, to know that the sky should be orange.
- x5n1 10y agoCan we get some instructions on how to actually use this. I want to test it out on pictures from: https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/
- mlsource 10y agounfortunately I'm not contributor of this project, but I hope author can answer soon )
- m_mueller 10y agoI'd apply it to an old B&W film to show off. Imagine Ben Hur or Citizen Kane in color!
- nightcracker 10y agoI see a potential problem with moving pictures - the neural network might decide that while red was an appropriate color for the truck in the last frame, blue is more likely in this frame.
- xiphias 10y agoYou can use the previous few frames for fixing this problem for videos
- thomasahle 10y agoThere might be a few scenes in between the viewings of the truck.
- pgeorgi 10y agoI'd imagine that many people wouldn't even notice (unless the truck's color is part of the plot)
- thomasahle 10y agoMaybe it's about a truck painting shop, and every time they paint something, it either doesn't change color, or get a color different from what the customer ordered. I would watch that.
- jcoffland 10y agoYou mean you would watch paint dry?
- Gigablah 10y agoNow give it a picture of a bike shed.
- illumen 10y agoI think a tool shed is more appropriate.
- georgemcbay 10y agoI think it was a reference to this concept: http://bikeshed.com/ http://bikeshed.com/
- baq 10y agono, it was about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikeshed_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikeshed_color
- walrus 10y agoHow about we stop arguing about which link to use and just pick one? I propose http://amzn.com/0345282779 http://amzn.com/0345282779. Of the three links proposed so far, this one is clearly the most authoritative.
- abdulhaq 10y agoIt came out red :-(
- SyneRyder 10y agoThe title says it's open source, but I couldn't actually see what the license is? (Maybe I missed it?)
- syockit 10y agoIt is open source. You can see the source. The license is no-license, so you can (only) fork it. That way, people can clone from your username instead of the original author, although that doesn't make any difference as they're all hosted on GitHub.
- SyneRyder 10y agoIn some countries, code is copyrighted by default unless the author specifies a different license or explicitly puts it into the public domain. Without a license (or asking the author for permission), I have to assume this code is copyright & All Rights Reserved, and that I can't do anything with it except read it. It's still interesting and cool to see! Just not what I thought it was when I clicked on the link.
- BugsBunnySan 10y agoSide note: "some countries" actually encompasses almost all the countries in the world, since source code falls under the Berne Convention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention, which automatically grants the author copyright on anything they make, unless they explicitly give it up...
- lucideer 10y agoYou seem to be getting downvotes because you don't understand what the term "open source" means, but nobody has offered to explain so: Open source does not just mean you can see the source. From Wikipedia[0]: "Open-source software is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
- g_sch 10y agoI'd be interested to see what kind of hidden biases this might reveal, especially about people, e.g. skin tone, eye color, etc.
- jkrippy 10y agoThe boy at the beach looks very orange/blue to me and reminds me of this: http://www.slashfilm.com/orangeblue-contrast-in-movie-posters/ http://www.slashfilm.com/orangeblue-contrast-in-movie-poster...
- gcr 10y agoAgreed. I wonder how good this model is at filling the skin tone of someone. It would be sad if (for example) it turned everybody into white people or something like that. In biometrics, there's been similar cases of software like face detectors and face recognition working very well on people from China and not very well for other people, because all the researchers who trained those models only had available large public databases from Chinese universities. The model hadn't seen any other ethnicity so its performance on "non-Chinese" folks wasn't surprising.
- fmeyer 10y agoI'm colorblind and I can't tell the difference between the prediction and the GT. My coworker says that they have slight differences in some colors. Congrats, you wrote the first colorblind NN ever!
- rimantas 10y agoI'd say the differences are very well expressed.
- mushmouth 10y agoThis looks pretty cool. Do any photography people or film people can use this?
- SamDLC 10y agoIt may be interesting to investigate using this for image compression/decompression. ie starting with an image having a greatly reduced color space, could the NN reproduce the original image?
- argonaut 10y agoThese results: http://richzhang.github.io/colorization/ http://richzhang.github.io/colorization/ from Berkeley are much better than this model (and the code is open source as well). Furthermore, those better results have the advantage of a much simpler model. This model has a fairly complicated architecture (a complex residual concatenation setup) and many more parameters (I would guess anywhere between 2x-10x as many, but I'd have to take a closer look), which means it's much slower to run and takes up more memory (disk and RAM). I'd also say that in general the better model does things that are a lot more common sense: using the CIE Lab color space (perceptually uniform), omitting pooling, using a classification loss instead of regression (regression in generally performs poorly in deep learning), etc.
- logicrook 10y agoAnd the thread concerning that much better model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11403653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11403653
- im3w1l 10y agoThe authors of that point out that those are the especially successful cases. Presumably the the new article also showcases the success. For comparability, I think it would be best if we could see outputs for the two models for the same, chosen in advance and not cherry picked, images.
- specialist 10y agoIdle thought: Could colorization be used to (lossy) compress full color images (usefully)? What I imagine is full color input -> create B/W & color histogram (list of colors used) -> image viewer uses colorization algorithm to reapply colors.
- adrusi 10y agoI don't really know a ton about image compression, but I exported the same photo to jpg using the same settings twice: once with 3 channels and once desaturated and then with two channels hidden (I couldn't figure out how to make a 1-channel jpg in gimp, no sure if it's possible). The 1-channel export had less than 30% file size reduction. I don't think a compression technique that would require that much processing power and have that little size reduction would be too useful.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoWhat's the application and/or interest in colorizing images? Does it generalize to other types of problems?
- gravypod 10y agoI don't know if OP will see this but I'd love it if you could use your experience making this to write up a blog post about how it works or port it to being able to adjust color scales for color blind people. I'd love to combine this technology with this: http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html You would probably have some cool results as you could generate examples of what they would look like to color blind people, and a corrected set so color blind people could see them. Would be a cool, and I am assuming simpler problem then the one you have already managed to solve. Good show, great work.
- mkagenius 10y agoCan this be used to train a model which can un-blur an image?
- amelius 10y agoI'm looking for a technique that can upscale images nicely (using NNs). I've found this: [1], but the results seem somewhat disappointing. One of the problems is that the quality measures are (in my case) subjective (the results should look convincing but need not be "perfect", whatever that may mean). [1] http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling-convnets/ http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling-convnets/
- amelius 10y agoHow would this system colorize this image?: http://imgur.com/RBEht9H http://imgur.com/RBEht9H
- nitrogen 10y agoI wonder if this could be used to improve the proposed color prediction in Daala, or if the memory and CPU requirements are too high to put into a video codec.
- gwern 10y agoReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4ft4hj/colornet_neural_network_to_colorize_grayscale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4ft4hj/colorne...
- amelius 10y agoDoes it color the sea blue and the grass green?
- new_hackers 10y agoThe sky is blue, grass is green, trucks are red, and everything else is a shade of brown :-) pretty cool work!