A colorization method for historical videos

Abstract

The development of imaging technology has allowed people to move beyond the black-and-white era and into the age of color. However, preserved black-and-white historical footage remains a precious memory for people. We propose a coloring method for historical videos that combines historical image coloring methods with temporal consistency methods, thus achieving color editing for historical videos. The temporal consistency technique uses deep video priors to model the video structure and effectively ensure smoothness between frames after video color editing, even with a small amount of training data. Meanwhile, we have collected a historical video dataset named MHMD-Video, which facilitates further research on colorization of historical videos for researchers. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through objective and subjective evaluation.

Keywords

• Computer vision
• Deep learning
• Video colorization