Diffusing Colors: Image Colorization with Text Guided Diffusion
This work addresses colorization challenges for applications like historical image restoration, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models.
The paper tackles the problem of grayscale image colorization by introducing a framework that uses text-guided diffusion models to improve controllability and visual quality, achieving better semantic coherence and user control compared to existing techniques.
The colorization of grayscale images is a complex and subjective task with significant challenges. Despite recent progress in employing large-scale datasets with deep neural networks, difficulties with controllability and visual quality persist. To tackle these issues, we present a novel image colorization framework that utilizes image diffusion techniques with granular text prompts. This integration not only produces colorization outputs that are semantically appropriate but also greatly improves the level of control users have over the colorization process. Our method provides a balance between automation and control, outperforming existing techniques in terms of visual quality and semantic coherence. We leverage a pretrained generative Diffusion Model, and show that we can finetune it for the colorization task without losing its generative power or attention to text prompts. Moreover, we present a novel CLIP-based ranking model that evaluates color vividness, enabling automatic selection of the most suitable level of vividness based on the specific scene semantics. Our approach holds potential particularly for color enhancement and historical image colorization.