Cutting colourful chores

A computer-assisted method for converting black and white images and movies into colour has been developed by researchers at the

Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering.

The method is said to be less expensive and time-consuming than earlier colourisation methods developed in the late 20th century and which were used to convert to colour several classic black-and-white motion pictures such as “Casablanca.”

A major difficulty with colourisation has been its labour-intensiveness. In order to add colour a still image an artist typically begins by dividing the image into regions, and then proceeds to assign a colour to each region. There is no fully automatic way to reliably perform this task, since automatic algorithms often fail to correctly identify fuzzy or complex region boundaries, such as the boundary between a subject’s hair and face. Hence, the artist is often left with the task of manually delineating complicated boundaries between regions.