

Colorization Using Optimization (impressive results) - smanek
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yweiss/Colorization/

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jamesjyu
Cool stuff; there are lots of other techniques that also do pretty well.

This really highlights how insensitive we are to color fidelity in images. The
granularity of the marked images is very low quality, but, the results are
very good. This is the same reason that for JPG and other image compression
techniques, you can downsample the hell out of the color components with no
apparent degradation to the image quality.

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dcurtis
Humans are extremely sensitive to color fidelity. Look closely as those
processed images.

You can tell that something is "off" about them, because while the algorithm
is extremely good, it can't reproduce the true color gamut of reality, or even
of a low quality jpeg that is based on a real photograph.

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ovi256
Humans are naturally sensitive to color, but not to hue fidelity, as hue
synthesis shows: all hues are synthesized out of 3 basic wavelengths, color
displays are based on this. Also, we tolerate B&W and sepia images well, we
even love them. We are sensitive to hue saturation and contrast, and the
discussed algorithm fulfills these two requirements. Furthermore, we have been
desensitized by the heavy use of compression in color images and by
uncalibrated displays.

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aantix
The program Recolored packages this functionality up into a nice app.

<http://www.recolored.com/>

The gallery is impressive. <http://www.recolored.com/gallery.php>

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petercooper
Heh, I clicked to add this to del.icio.us, then noticed I'd already added and
tagged it three years ago. It's amazing how much goes around and comes around
again without us noticing :)

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carterschonwald
This sort of problem is really hard, but a little bit of cleverness gets you a
long way. Theres some really cool information theoretic bounds that you can
cook up on how good various algorithms can do for video using whatever
assumptions you have on the video. (eg does the motion respect physics? do we
have sufficient sampling that we don't some ambiguous choice? etc)

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Malcx
It would be interesting to see it used on genuine black and white photos
rather than desaturated colour originals...

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nazgulnarsil
I would pay for this. Hell, you should pitch this to Adobe. Would be an
awesome PS plugin.

~~~
wmf
That'll be $120; no need to tip me.

<http://www.digitalfilmtools.com/powerstroke/>

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babul
Wow. I am deeply impressed by that.

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tokipin
they shoulda shown fun recolorings. like making people's faces orange

