Automatic black and white film colorization using texture features and artificial neural networks

This study represents an innovative automatic method for black and white films colorization using texture features and a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network. In the proposed method, efforts are made to remove human interference in the process of colorization and replace it with an artificial neural network (ANN) which is trained using the features of the reference frame. Later, this network is employed for automatic colorization of the remained black and white frames. The reference frames of the black and white film are manually colored. Using a Gabor filter bank, texture features of all the pixels of the reference frame are extracted and used as the input feature vector of the ANN, while the output will be the color vector of the corresponding pixel. Finally, the next frames’ feature vectors are fed respectively to the trained neural network, and color vectors of those frames are the output. Applying AVI videos and using various color spaces, a series of experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed colorization process. This method needs considerable time to provide a reasonable output, given rapidly changing scenes. Fortunately however, due to the high correlation between consecutive frames in typical video footage, the overall performance is promising regarding both visual appearance and the calculated MSE error. Apart from the application, we also aim to show the importance of the low level features in a mainly high level process, and the mapping ability of a neural network.