Fast Digital Image Colorization Technique

Colorization is a term used to describe a computerized process for adding color to black and white pictures, movies or TV programs. This process involves replacing a scalar value stored at each pixel of the gray scale image that represents its intensity or luminance by a vector in a three dimensional color space with luminance, saturation and hue or simply RGB. Since mapping between intensity and color has no inherently "correct" solution, human interaction and/or external information usually play a large role. In this paper we present a novel colorization method that takes advantage of the morphological distance transformation and image structures to propagate color within the gray scale image. The proposed method does not need precise segmentation, since the color is provided simply by scribbles which are next automatically propagated within the image. The effectiveness of the algorithm allows the user to work interactively and to obtain the desired results promptly after providing the color scribbles. In the paper we show that the proposed method allows for high quality colorization results for still images.