End-to-End Image Colorization With Multiscale Pyramid Transformer

Abstract

Image colorization is a challenging task due to its ill-posed and multimodal nature, leading to unsatisfactory results in traditional approaches that rely on reference images or user guides. Although deep learning-based methods have been proposed, they may not be sufficient due to the lack of semantic understanding. To overcome this limitation, we present an innovative end-to-end automatic colorization method that does not require any color reference images and achieves superior quantitative and qualitative results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our approach incorporates a Multiscale Pyramid Transformer that captures both local and global contextual information and a novel attention module called Dual-Attention, which replaces the traditional Window Attention and Channel Attention with faster and lighter Separable Dilated Attention and Factorized Channel Attention. Additionally, we introduce a new color decoder called Color-Attention, which learns colorization patterns from grayscale images and color images of the current training set, resulting in improved generalizability and eliminating the need for constructing color priors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in various benchmark datasets, including high-level computer vision tasks such as classification, segmentation, and detection. Our method offers robustness, generalization ability, and improved colorization quality, making it a valuable contribution to the field of image colorization.