Watch how this app uses AI to colorize vintage photos

This fancy interactive deep colorization software harnesses AI to fill in colors on a black and white photo with just a few inputs. Watch this cool demo.

From the developer team:

We propose a deep learning approach for user-guided image colorization. The system directly maps a grayscale image, along with sparse, local user "hints" to an output colorization with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Rather than using hand-defined rules, the network propagates user edits by fusing low-level cues along with high-level semantic information, learned from large-scale data. We train on a million images, with simulated user inputs. To guide the user towards efficient input selection, the system recommends likely colors based on the input image and current user inputs. The colorization is performed in a single feed-forward pass, enabling real-time use. Even with randomly simulated user inputs, we show that the proposed system helps novice users quickly create realistic colorizations, and show large improvements in colorization quality with just a minute of use. In addition, we show that the framework can incorporate other user "hints" as to the desired colorization, showing an application to color histogram transfer.

The fun part is that you can put in any input and make the photography any colors you choose with a natural-looking blend of unnatural colors. PINK DOGGO PLS:


Real-Time User-Guided Image Colorization with Learned Deep Priors (Zhang et al via GitHub)