Automatic Colorization of Images from Chinese Black and White Films Based on CNN

The colorization of black and white films was a hot topic in the 1980s. Some black-and-white movies regained their luster through colorization. Although people are controversial about the artistic value of film colorization, it is no doubt that color images can enhance visual effects. Inspired by the recent colorization methods using deep learning, we propose a novel colorization model which combines two Convolutional Neural Networks and uses multi-scale convolution kernels to get better spatial consistency. Most of the current datasets used in the colorization networks are not applicable to colorizing images from Chinese black and white films. The main reason is that the objects in these films are very different from today's. To address this, we extract a large number of images from Chinese color films of the last century as a training dataset. Experiments demonstrate that our model can obtain pretty good results of colorizing images from Chinese black and white films.