Auto Colorization of Gray-Scale Image Using YCbCr Color Space

Abstract

The process of converting gray images or videos to color ones by adding colors to them and transforming them from one-dimension to three-dimension is called colorization. This process is often used to make the image appear more visually appealing. The main problem with the colorization process is the lack of knowledge of the true colors of the objects in the picture when it is captured. For that, there is no a unique solution. In the current work, the colorization of gray images is proposed based on the utilization of the YCbCr color space. Reference image (color image) is selected for transferring the color to a gray image. Both color and gray images are transferred to YCbCr color space. Then, the Y value of the gray image is combined with the Cb and Cr values of the reference image, based on the Euclidian distance between them. The quality of the resulted image was measured based on several quality measures, which indicated very good results. The proposed algorithm is simple, efficient, and fast.