Papers › PixColor: Pixel Recursive Colorization

PixColor: Pixel Recursive Colorization

19 May 2017arXiv:1705.07208archive 2025-07-28

Sergio Guadarrama, Ryan Dahl, David Bieber, Mohammad Norouzi, Jonathon Shlens, Kevin Murphy

We propose a novel approach to automatically produce multiple colorized versions of a grayscale image. Our method results from the observation that the task of automated colorization is relatively easy given a low-resolution version of the color image. We first train a conditional PixelCNN to generate a low resolution color for a given grayscale image. Then, given the generated low-resolution color image and the original grayscale image as inputs, we train a second CNN to generate a high-resolution colorization of an image. We demonstrate that our approach produces more diverse and plausible colorizations than existing methods, as judged by human raters in a "Visual Turing Test".

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Tasks

Colorization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Colorization ImageNet val PixColor FID-5K 24.32 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

ColorizationPixelCNN

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