Automated Colorization of Grayscale Images Using Texture Descriptors and a Modified Fuzzy C-Means Clustering

A novel example-based process for Automated Colorization of grayscale images using Texture Descriptors (ACTD) without any human intervention is proposed. By analyzing a set of sample color images, coherent regions of homogeneous textures are extracted. A multi-channel filtering technique is used for texture-based image segmentation, combined with a modified Fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering algorithm. This modified FCM clustering algorithm includes both the local spatial information from neighboring pixels, and the spatial Euclidian distance to the cluster’s center of gravity. For each area of interest, state-of-the-art texture descriptors are then computed and stored, along with corresponding color information. These texture descriptors and the color information are used for colorization of a grayscale image with similar textures. Given a grayscale image to be colorized, the segmentation and feature extraction processes are repeated. The texture descriptors are used to perform Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). The colorization process is performed by Chroma replacement. This research finds numerous applications, ranging from classic film restoration and enhancement, to adding valuable information into medical and satellite imaging. Also, this can be used to enhance the detection of objects from x-ray images at the airports.