When we sent a black and white version of the above photo through Algorithmia it totally missed the person doing yoga and colored her the same gray as the rocks. Stan HoraczekĬolourise also seems to do a better job at identifying human subjects even if they are small in the frame. Stan Horaczek How Algorithmia interpreted the colors in the scene. It was converted (using a very basic black-and-white conversion) in Lightroom. The original black and white image fed into the site. RELATED: You should develop your own black-and-white film. The images processed with Colourise also tend to have a cooler tone than the ones processed by Algorithmia. The colors tend to be desaturated, which makes the images look like they were shot on expired film stocks. Stan HoraczekĬolourise.sg is a lot better at filling in an entire image with color-you won’t find any rough borders in the image output. The desaturated colors make it look a bit like it was shot with an old roll of color film. As you can see the new program did a nice job of filling the entire image with color. The colorized version as interpreted by Colourise.sg. We were curious to see how Colourise.sg would interpret these same images. It also seemed to do better with human subjects when they appeared quite large in the frame. Stan HoraczekĪlthough the original tool did an okay job differentiating humans from nature, it often applied color with very rough borders. The colorized version of the photo as interpreted by Algorithmia. In contrast, Algorithmia was trained using 1.3 million images from ImageNet, a database often used by researchers at Stanford and Princeton specifically to train AI.

The creators did this by training the tool with historical images from Singapore. The goal of Colourise was to create a program that was specifically trained to colorize old Singaporean photos.

According to the creators of the project Algorithmia produced colorized image that lacked intensity, which makes the final product appear inauthentic. Stan HoraczekĬolourise.sg was developed in Singapore by a company called GovTech during a January hackathon.

The original image shot on Kodak Tri-X black-and-white film. A new tool called Colourise.sg is now available and so far it appears to be more accurate that the Algorithmia program. While the program was cool, the results were often far from perfect. A few years ago we told you about a new technology called Algorithmia that could automatically guess accurate colors for black and white images.

Colorize black and white photo