Colorizing Images and Video by Scribbling

Guspaz writes "Up until now, colorizing a video or image has been a painstaking and mostly manual task. However, researchers in Israel have come up with a new way of colorizing images just by making a few scribbles. The technique works on the premise that 'neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors,' and also allows colorization of videos by 'marking' about one in ten frames."

Comments

Photoshop

[FoXDie]

Personally I can't wait until there is a Photoshop filter for this. :D

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[kotku]

Video Compression !

Only save the intensity channel and a few bits of markup and you compress the stream quite a bit.

Awesome!

[JesusCigarettes]

Now it's even easier for corporations re-releasing films to completely destroy the original beauty of a film by adding unnatural and unnecessary color!

Coming soon, new dubbing techniques will allow easy substitution of the original actors' voices and dialogue with trite teen-angst to appeal to younger generations.

Re:Awesome!

[mzwaterski]

Then don't watch the re-released version. I mean come on, of all things to complain about. "Some company has the ability to change something I like into a form that other people will like."

Tech Geeks vs. Film Purists

[venomkid]

You b/w film purists. If all you can see is a threat to your bizarre, luddite idea of what film should be, you need to get your heads checked, or at least you need to listen to your inner geek. Stop using these folks' achievement as an opportunity for chest-thumping.

The idea that one could color correct video with a few strokes from mspaint is staggering. Imagine if one could do this to color video, in real time... you could color-highlight an object and the computer could follow it without sensors or other pre-implanted devices, and that's not even a particularly original idea. This is awesome technology with applications probably well beyond what we see here.

Realtime

[phorm]

I could see this working best as a "realtime" colour filter, especially if you're using a pen or something similar. Scratch near a border and view the result... if it goes a bit beyond where you want scratch on the other side of the border. If it's not quite enough lengthen your scratch.

I wonder how much CPU power is required, if you could do this realtime or close to it would be quite awesome, but having to make your scratches and click "apply filter" then wait for 30 seconds would not be nearly as useful/efficient.

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[TheGavster]

What a brilliant plan! What if we were to take groupings of four pixels, store luminance for each and an average of their red and blue weights, netting a savings of:

uncompressed: 24 bits per pixel X 4 pixels = 72 bits
compressed: 8 luminance bits X 4 pixels + 8 Red bits + 8 V bits = 48 bits

100 - (48 / 72 * 100) = 33.3%!

Wait ... this sounds an aweful lot like the YUV encoding used in MPEG compression ... probably has something to do with it actually being the YUV encoding used in MPEG compression.