Image Colorization

Benchmarks archive 2025-07-28

3 leaderboard tables shown for this task, 3 with rows (a “benchmark” on this site is a table with at least one row, as on /sota), ordered by row count. “Best model” is the first row in the archive's own order at snapshot; nothing is re-ranked here and metric direction is not recorded in the archive. PwC's Trend sparklines are not in the archive, so that column is omitted.

Syntology column: samples harvested from the paper's repositories and executed on synthesized fixtures; “ran” is not a correctness claim and does not order the table. A dash means no Syntology record for that paper, not a recorded non-run. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.

Libraries

Not in the archive: the export carries no per-task library table, so there is nothing to show at snapshot 2025-07-28.

Datasets archive 2025-07-28

3 datasets whose archive record lists this task, ordered by the archive's paper count.

Subtasks archive 2025-07-28

1 subtask in the archive's task tree.

Most implemented papers archive 2025-07-28

30 shown of 63 papers with code (127 tagged with this task in all), ordered by repositories listed in the archive, not by stars (the archive holds no stars, so PwC's “Social” and “Latest” sorts cannot be reproduced). Papers without a page here are shown as plain text.

• Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
  30 Mar 2017 190 repositories listed Syntology ran 6 of 31 samples · 25 unverified · 6 pointer-only (licence)
  Image-to-image translation is a class of vision and graphics problems where the goal is to learn the mapping between an input image and an output image using a training set of aligned image pairs.
• Colorful Image Colorization
  28 Mar 2016 39 repositories listed Syntology ran 32 of 73 samples · 41 unverified · 41 pointer-only (licence)
  We embrace the underlying uncertainty of the problem by posing it as a classification task and use class-rebalancing at training time to increase the diversity of colors in the result.
• Deep Koalarization: Image Colorization using CNNs and Inception-ResNet-v2
  9 Dec 2017 16 repositories listed
  We review some of the most recent approaches to colorize gray-scale images using deep learning methods.
• Guided Image Generation with Conditional Invertible Neural Networks
  4 Jul 2019 7 repositories listed Syntology ran 3 of 3 samples · 0 unverified · 3 pointer-only (licence)
  We demonstrate these properties for the tasks of MNIST digit generation and image colorization.
• Image Colorization with Generative Adversarial Networks
  14 Mar 2018 7 repositories listed
  Over the last decade, the process of automatic image colorization has been of significant interest for several application areas including restoration of aged or degraded images.
• Composer: Creative and Controllable Image Synthesis with Composable Conditions
  20 Feb 2023 6 repositories listed
  Recent large-scale generative models learned on big data are capable of synthesizing incredible images yet suffer from limited controllability.
• PixelShuffler: A Simple Image Translation Through Pixel Rearrangement
  3 Oct 2024 4 repositories listed
  Image-to-image translation is a topic in computer vision that has a vast range of use cases ranging from medical image translation, such as converting MRI scans to CT scans or to other MRI contrasts, to image…
• Zero-Shot Image Restoration Using Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Model
  1 Dec 2022 4 repositories listed Syntology ran 12 of 23 samples · 11 unverified
  Most existing Image Restoration (IR) models are task-specific, which can not be generalized to different degradation operators.
• Wavelet Transform-assisted Adaptive Generative Modeling for Colorization
  9 Jul 2021 4 repositories listed
  Unsupervised deep learning has recently demonstrated the promise of producing high-quality samples.
• Deep Edge-Aware Interactive Colorization against Color-Bleeding Effects
  4 Jul 2021 3 repositories listed
  Deep neural networks for automatic image colorization often suffer from the color-bleeding artifact, a problematic color spreading near the boundaries between adjacent objects.
• Color2Embed: Fast Exemplar-Based Image Colorization using Color Embeddings
  15 Jun 2021 3 repositories listed Syntology ran 2 of 9 samples · 7 unverified
  In this paper, we present a fast exemplar-based image colorization approach using color embeddings named Color2Embed.
• Automatic Temporally Coherent Video Colorization
  21 Apr 2019 3 repositories listed
  This paper proposes a method to colorize line art frames in an adversarial setting, to create temporally coherent video of large anime by improving existing image to image translation methods.
• Real-Time User-Guided Image Colorization with Learned Deep Priors
  8 May 2017 3 repositories listed
  The system directly maps a grayscale image, along with sparse, local user "hints" to an output colorization with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN).
• Let there be color!: joint end-to-end learning of global and local image priors for automatic image colorization with simultaneous classification
  1 Jul 2016 3 repositories listed
  We present a novel technique to automatically colorize grayscale images that combines both global priors and local image features.
• Learning Representations for Automatic Colorization
  22 Mar 2016 3 repositories listed Syntology ran 1 of 1 samples · 0 unverified
  This intermediate output can be used to automatically generate a color image, or further manipulated prior to image formation.
• Diffusion Prior-Based Amortized Variational Inference for Noisy Inverse Problems
  23 Jul 2024 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 21 of 27 samples · 6 unverified · 5 pointer-only (licence)
  Recent studies on inverse problems have proposed posterior samplers that leverage the pre-trained diffusion models as powerful priors.
• Generating Images with Sparse Representations
  5 Mar 2021 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 2 of 2 samples · 0 unverified
  The high dimensionality of images presents architecture and sampling-efficiency challenges for likelihood-based generative models.
• Colorization Transformer
  8 Feb 2021 2 repositories listed
  We present the Colorization Transformer, a novel approach for diverse high fidelity image colorization based on self-attention.
• BIGPrior: Towards Decoupling Learned Prior Hallucination and Data Fidelity in Image Restoration
  3 Nov 2020 2 repositories listed
  Our method, though partly reliant on the quality of the generative network inversion, is competitive with state-of-the-art supervised and task-specific restoration methods.
• Instance-aware Image Colorization
  21 May 2020 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 0 of 7 samples · 7 unverified
  Previous methods leverage the deep neural network to map input grayscale images to plausible color outputs directly.
• Leveraging the Powerful Attention of a Pre-trained Diffusion Model for Exemplar-based Image Colorization
  21 May 2025 1 repository listed
  Specifically, we use 335 input-reference pairs from previous research, achieving an FID of 95.
• A GAN-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework for Rooftop Detection from Historical Aerial Imagery
  29 Mar 2025 1 repository listed
  Accurate rooftop detection from historical aerial imagery is vital for examining long-term urban development and human settlement patterns.
• Language-based Image Colorization: A Benchmark and Beyond
  19 Mar 2025 1 repository listed
  In view of the lack of a comprehensive review of language-based colorization literature, we conduct a thorough analysis and benchmarking.
• Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow: Towards Minimum MSE Photo-Realistic Image Restoration
  1 Oct 2024 1 repository listed Syntology ran 4 of 10 samples · 6 unverified
  Photo-realistic image restoration algorithms are typically evaluated by distortion measures (e.
• ColorMamba: Towards High-quality NIR-to-RGB Spectral Translation with Mamba
  15 Aug 2024 1 repository listed
  To explore global long-range dependencies and local context for efficient spectral translation, we introduce learnable padding tokens to enhance the distinction of image boundaries and prevent potential confusion within…
• SketchDeco: Decorating B&W Sketches with Colour
  29 May 2024 1 repository listed
  This paper introduces a novel approach to sketch colourisation, inspired by the universal childhood activity of colouring and its professional applications in design and story-boarding.
• Multi-scale HSV Color Feature Embedding for High-fidelity NIR-to-RGB Spectrum Translation
  25 Apr 2024 1 repository listed
  The NIR-to-RGB spectral domain translation is a formidable task due to the inherent spectral mapping ambiguities within NIR inputs and RGB outputs.
• Fine-Tuning InstructPix2Pix for Advanced Image Colorization
  8 Dec 2023 1 repository listed
  This paper presents a novel approach to human image colorization by fine-tuning the InstructPix2Pix model, which integrates a language model (GPT-3) with a text-to-image model (Stable Diffusion).
• Nighttime Thermal Infrared Image Colorization with Feedback-based Object Appearance Learning
  24 Oct 2023 1 repository listed
  Extensive experiments illustrate that the proposed FoalGAN is not only effective for appearance learning of small objects, but also outperforms other image translation methods in terms of semantic preservation and edge…
• Dequantization and Color Transfer with Diffusion Models
  6 Jul 2023 1 repository listed Syntology ran 2 of 2 samples · 0 unverified · 2 pointer-only (licence)
  Our method can optionally condition on the source texture in part or all of the image.

Syntology lines on 11 of the papers shown; no Syntology record for the others (a paper without an arXiv id cannot be joined to the graph, and absence from the graph layer is not a recorded non-run). “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized fixture, not that the paper's result was reproduced. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.