Infrared Image Colorization Using a S-Shape Network

This paper proposes a novel approach for colorizing near infrared (NIR) images using a S-shape network (SNet). The proposed approach is based on the usage of an encoder-decoder architecture followed with a secondary assistant network. The encoder-decoder consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. The assistant network is a shallow encoder-decoder to enhance the edge and improve the output, which can be trained end-to-end from a few image examples. The trained model does not require any user guidance or a reference image database. Furthermore, our architecture will preserve clear edges within NIR images. Our overall architecture is trained and evaluated on a real-world dataset containing a significant amount of road scene images. This dataset was captured by a NIR camera and a corresponding RGB camera to facilitate side-by-side comparison. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our SNet works well, and outperforms contemporary state-of-the-art approaches.