Disentangled Image Colorization via Global Anchors

Colorization is multimodal by nature and challenges existing frameworks to achieve colorful and structurally consistent results. Even the sophisticated autoregressive model struggles to maintain long-distance color consistency due to the fragility of sequential dependence. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel colorization framework that disentangles color multimodality and structure consistency through global color anchors, so that both aspects could be learned effectively. Our key insight is that several carefully located anchors could approximately represent the color distribution of an image, and conditioned on the anchor colors, we can predict the image color in a deterministic manner by utilizing internal correlation. To this end, we construct a colorization model with dual branches, where the color modeler predicts the color distribution for anchor color representation, and the color generator predicts the pixel colors by referring the sampled anchor colors. Importantly, the anchors are located under two principles: color independence and global coverage, which is realized with clustering analysis on the deep color features. To simplify the computation, we creatively adopt soft superpixel segmentation to reduce the image primitives, which still nicely reserves the reversibility to pixel-wise representation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves notable superiority over various mainstream frameworks in perceptual quality. Thanks to anchor-based color representation, our model has the flexibility to support diverse and controllable colorization as well.