Interactive colorization based on hybrid distance transform

Colorization is a computerized process for adding color to black and white pictures, movies or TV programs. Since changes in color are more easily perceived than changes of intensity, therefore this procedure makes the interpretation and understanding of images easier. During colorization process a scalar value representing pixel's intensity is being replaced by a vector in a given color space. Since the mapping between intensity and color has no inherently correct solution, human interaction and external information usually plays a large role. In this paper we present a novel colorization method based on an hybrid morphological distance transformation which considers the image structures to automatically propagate the color inserted into the image by a user. The effectiveness of the algorithm allows to work interactively and to obtain desired results in real time.