Image Colorization: A Survey and Dataset

Image colorization is an essential image processing and computer vision branch to colorize images and videos. Recently, deep learning techniques progressed notably for image colorization. This article presents a comprehensive survey of recent state-of-the-art colorization using deep learning algorithms, describing their fundamental block architectures in terms of skip connections, input \etc as well as optimizers, loss functions, training protocols, and training data \etc Generally, we can roughly categorize the existing colorization techniques into seven classes. Besides, we also provide some additional essential issues, such as benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics. We also introduce a new dataset specific to colorization and perform an experimental evaluation of the publicly available methods. In the last section, we discuss the limitations, possible solutions, and future research directions of the rapidly evolving topic of deep image colorization that the community should further address. Dataset and Codes for evaluation will be publicly available at https://github.com/saeed-anwar/ColorSurvey