Abstract
Video colorization is a challenging and highly ill-posed problem. Although recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image colorization, there is relatively less research effort on video colorization, and existing methods always suffer from severe flickering artifacts (temporal inconsistency) or unsatisfactory colorization. We address this problem from a new perspective, by jointly considering colorization and temporal consistency in a unified framework. Specifically, we propose a novel temporally consistent video colorization (TCVC) framework. TCVC effectively propagates frame-level deep features in a bidirectional way to enhance the temporal consistency of colorization. Furthermore, TCVC introduces a self-regularization learning (SRL) scheme to minimize the differences in predictions obtained using different time steps. SRL does not require any ground-truth color videos for training and can further improve temporal consistency. Experiments demonstrate that our method can not only provide visually pleasing colorized video, but also with clearly better temporal consistency than state-of-the-art methods. A video demo is provided at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7dczMs-olE, while code is available at https://github.com/lyh-18/TCVC-Temporally-Consistent-Video-Colorization.
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Availability of data and materials
Data and code are available at https://github.com/lyh-18/TCVC-Temporally-Consistent-Video-Colorization. A video demo is provided at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7dczMs-olE.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61906184), the Joint Lab of CAS–HK, and the Shanghai Committee of Science and Technology, China (20DZ1100800, 21DZ1100100).
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Yihao Liu received his B.S. degree from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, in 2018. He is now working towards the Ph.D. degree in Multimedia Laboratory, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is supervised by Prof. Yu Qiao and Prof. Chao Dong. His research interests include computer vision and image/video enhancement.
Hengyuan Zhao received his B.S. degree from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, in 2020. He is now working towards the Ph.D. degree at Show Lab in National University of Singapore, supervised by Prof. Mike Shou. He formerly worked as a research intern at VIS Baidu Inc. and SenseTime Inc. He also worked as a research intern in Multimedia Laboratory, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, supervised by Prof. Yu Qiao and Prof. Chao Dong. His research interests include computer vision and image/video processing and generation.
Kelvin C. K. Chan is a reseach scientist at Google. Before joining Google, he was a Ph.D. student at MMLab@NTU under the supervision of Prof. Chen Change Loy. He received his M.Phil. degree in mathematics as well as his B.Sc. and B.Eng. degrees from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His current research interest focuses on low-level vision and multimodal content generation.
Xintao Wang is currently a researcher in Applied Research Center (ARC), Tencent PCG. He received his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2020. He was selected as an outstanding reviewer in CVPR 2019 and an outstanding reviewer (honorable mention) in BMVC 2019. He won the first place in several international super-resolution challenges including NTIRE2019, NTIRE2018, and PIRM2018. His research interests focus on low-level vision problems, including superresolution, image and video restoration.
Chen Change Loy (Senior Member, IEEE) received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Queen Mary University of London, in 2010. He is currently an associate professor with the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is also an adjunct associate professor with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining NTU, he served as a research assistant professor with the MMLab of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, from 2013 to 2018. He was a postdoctoral researcher with Queen Mary University of London and Vision Semantics Limited, from 2010 to 2013. He serves as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and International Journal of Computer Vision. He also serves/served as an area chair of major conferences such as ICCV 2021, CVPR 2021, CVPR 2019, and ECCV 2018. His research interests include image/video restoration and enhancement, generative tasks, and representation learning.
Yu Qiao (Senior Member, IEEE) is currently a professor with the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the director of the Institute of Advanced Computing and Digital Engineering. He has published more than 180 articles in international journals and conferences, including T-PAMI, IJCV, T-IP, T-SP, CVPR, and ICCV. His research interests include computer vision, deep learning, and bioinformation. He received the First Prize of the Guangdong Technological Invention Award, and the Jiaxi Lv Young Researcher Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His group achieved the first runner-up at the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2015 in scene recognition, and the Winner at the ActivityNet Large Scale Activity Recognition Challenge 2016 in video classification. He has served as the Program Chair of the IEEE ICIST 2014.
Chao Dong is currently an associate professor in Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his Ph.D. degree from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016. In 2014, he first introduced deep learning method–SRCNN into the super-resolution field. This seminal work was chosen as one of the top ten “opular Articles” of TPAMI in 2016. His team has won several championships in international challenges–NTIRE2018, PIRM2018, NTIRE2019, NTIRE2020, AIM2020, and NTIRE2022. He worked in SenseTime from 2016 to 2018, as the team leader of Super-Resolution Group. In 2021, he was chosen as one of the World’s Top 2% Scientists. In 2022, he was recognized as the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in computer vision. His current research interest focuses on low-level vision problems, such as image/video super-resolution, denoising, and enhancement.
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Liu, Y., Zhao, H., Chan, K.C.K. et al. Temporally consistent video colorization with deep feature propagation and self-regularization learning. Comp. Visual Media 10, 375–395 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-023-0342-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-023-0342-8