Luminance-Chrominance Model for Image Colorization

International audience; This paper provides a new method to colorize gray-scale images. While the computation of the luminance channel is directly performed by a linear transformation, the colorization process is an ill-posed problem that requires some priors. In the literature two classes of approach exist. The first class includes manual methods that need the user to manually add colors on the image to colorize. The second class includes exemplar-based approaches where a color image, with a similar semantic content, is provided as input to the method. These two types of priors have their own advantages and drawbacks. In this paper, a new variational framework for exemplar-based colorization is proposed. A nonlocal approach is used to find relevant color in the source image in order to suggest colors on the gray-scale image. The spatial coherency of the result as well as the final color selection is provided by a nonconvex variational framework based on a total variation. An efficient primal-dual algorithm is provided, and a proof of its convergence is proposed. In this work, we also extend the proposed exemplar-based approach to combine both exemplar-based and manual methods. It provides a single framework that unifies advantages of both approaches. Finally, experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods illustrate the efficiency of our proposal. 1. Introduction. The colorization of a gray-scale image consists of adding color information to it. It is useful in the entertainment industry to make old productions more attractive. The reverse operation is based on perceptual assumptions and is today an active research area [28], [13], [37]. Colorization can also be used to add information in order to help further analysis of the image by a user (e.g., sensor fusion [43]). It can also be used for art restoration ; see, e.g., [17] or [41]. It is an old subject that began with the ability of screens and devices to display colors. A seminal approach consists in mapping each level of gray into a color-space [18]. Nevertheless, all colors cannot be recovered without an additional prior. In the existing approaches, priors can be added in two ways: with a direct addition of color on