NTIRE 2019 Challenge on Image Colorization: Report
Shuhang Gu, Radu Timofte, Richard Zhang, Maitreya Suin, Kuldeep Purohit, Ambasamudram Narayanan Rajagopalan, Athi Narayanan S., Jameer Babu Pinjari, Zhiwei Xiong, Zhan Shi, Chang Chen, Dong Liu, Manoj Kumar Sharma, Megh Makwana, Anuj Badhwar, Ajay Pratap Singh, Avinash Upadhyay, Akkshita Trivedi, Anil Kumar Saini, Santanu Chaudhury · 2019
This paper reviews the NTIRE challenge on image colorization (estimating color information from the corresponding gray image) with focus on proposed solutions and results. It is the first challenge of its kind. The challenge had 2 tracks. Track 1 takes a single gray image as input. In Track 2, in addition to the gray input image, some color seeds (randomly samples from the latent color image) are also provided for guiding the colorization process. The operators were learnable through provided pairs of gray and color training images. The tracks had 188 registered participants, and 8 teams competed in the final testing phase.