near-automatic colorization

[housepig]

Interesting site with an abstract of a paper on automatic colorization of stills or video, including some neat examples - quickly marking <10% of frames with color choices produces pretty good results...

http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yweiss/Colorization/

includes the algorithms they used, if any programmers want to get rockin' on it...

[winifreid]

House, what program did they use? I have used paintshop to do colorization of old B&W pics, but man, is it difficult and time consuming. What they did seems easy. But I assume the program they used costs a fortune.

[NightWing]

I think this has been cover one before here.

Its possible. Did something simular on figuring out edges to vectorize a bit map picture. If you did not mind a hugh number of vectored area would do a pretty good job.

If I read it right They mark area. Find edges. And any pixels of that level in a area are colored that color and uses the B&W to adjust the level of color.

Look at the paper for the formulas and basic how to.

[BJ_M]

the samples they show there look better than the crap they show most of the time on cable ..

though - its not exactly (far as i can tell) a program you can just download and go for it ..

[winifreid]

I skimmed over the article, but I can't really tell what they did. Do they have a program they used?

[AlecWest]

The answer to that question might be found on a DVD-ROM titled:

ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Full Conference DVD-ROM

where Weiss includes all clips/frames. It's sold by ACM Press (ISBN 1-58113-896-2). Their website seemed frozen, though, so I couldn't find the price for it. Problem is, you might need a Master's Degree in Mathematics (like Weiss) to understand what's on it.

This guy (Yair Weiss) is a certifiable genius. And whatever software he's using probably isn't "PC compatible" software.

[NightWing]

All the "math pack" is to run in another program that lets you "do stuff with math."

Hum... Wonder if I have my old notes on vectorising some where. Be fun to try to build up something. The paper has the logic in doing it.

[proxyx99]

Wow. these results seem like magic. The results are unbelievable... That is better then real life.

[Shadow57]

Didn't Ted Turner do that with movies about 30 years ago?

[NightWing]

If I read it right and that was a quickey.

It may be simular to finding the edges. Doing a floodfill. But using the B&W level to adjust how much color brightness etc is use on that pixels.

[proxyx99]

Yep, this is it; the concept is simple but what I'm amazed with is the quality of execution, natural skin tones and how well everything works together. Very well preserved opacity and flow. I've seen some other attempts but that always resulted in cartoonish, flat feeling. This is different. Airy. Soon all B&W stuff may end up like this. Kind of good and bad. I have mixed feelings about that.

[SatStorm]

Those days, TV stations around Europe "digitize" their archives. I bet soon or later, a technology about "auto colouring" and "cleaning" old stuff (25+ years old, many countries in Europe switch to colour at late 70s / early 80s) will appear.
There is a demand for this!

Another thing to expect the next 10 - 15 years, is CGI actors based on real ones (dead, decades now). They gonna use this technology at first for turning old radio shows to TV ones. It is "ethical" that way.

CGI based on true people gonna be the next hype, remember me!

[lordsmurf]

Magic!

[NightWing]

Yep, this is it; the concept is simple but what I'm amazed with is the quality of execution, natural skin tones and how well everything works together. Very well preserved opacity and flow. I've seen some other attempts but that always resulted in cartoonish, flat feeling. This is different. Airy. Soon all B&W stuff may end up like this. Kind of good and bad. I have mixed feelings about that.

Actualy its supprising even the concept of standard tv. The color layer is on top of a B&W signal.