From Coarse to Fine (FC2F): A New Scheme of Colorizing Thermal Infrared Images

Colorization of the thermal infrared image is an unsolved problem because usually there is no one-to-one relationship between an object’s color and its temperature. In this paper, we propose a new colorization scheme to address this problem. We first create a coarse colorization image that maintains cross-correlation between its RGB channels. Then the matrix of shift, rotation, and scaling between the coarse colorization image and a source natural color image is constructed. Finally, the transformations act on the coarse colorization image to obtain the resultant image, which has the appearance of the source image. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the new scheme and show its superiority to other state-of-the-art methods. The new scheme can be easily extended to the colorization of low illumination images and near-infrared images.