Two-Stage Sketch Colorization With Color Parsing

We implement high-quality sketch colorization using two-stage conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) training based on different intermediate features. The intermediate features used in autonomous colorization are the grayscale parsing and interval pixel-level color parsing. The autonomous colorization based on grayscale parsing feature can learn the spacial topology of pixels in the first stage to guide the colorization in the second stage. The autonomous colorization based on pixel-level color parsing feature can learn the color information of few feature points in the first stage to guide the colorization of all pixels in the second stage. Additionally, we use the intermediate feature of sampling points as constraint and achieve the color reconstruction using Laplacian mesh editing as a special second stage. Furthermore, the interactive colorization uses the superpixel color parsing as the intermediate feature. Specifically, we use the simple linear iterative cluster (SLIC) to obtain a palette that maintains the edges in the first stage to guide the colorization in the second stage. As for evaluation metrics, we propose a color-coded local binary pattern (CCLBP) score based on color distances from the first-order 8 pixels to the central pixel, to measure the degrees of color blurring and mess. We also propose a light-sensitivity (LS) score based on the reversed grayscale map, to measure the degrees of auto painting and overfitting of the color hint. According to the L1 distances between the original and generated color images based on these scores, compared with state-of-the-art methods including one stage approaches such as pix2pix and PaintsChainer and two-stage approaches such as Style2Paints and DeepColor, our model can achieve the highest-quality autonomous colorization. Moreover, compared with pix2pix, PaintsChainer and Style2Paints with color hints, according to the proposed objective evaluation as well as the user visual study, our model can achieve the highest-quality interactive colorization as well.