“Semi-Automatic Manga Colorization Using Conditional Adversarial Networks”, Maksim Golyadkin, Ilya Makarov2021 (; similar)⁠:

Manga colorization is time-consuming and hard to automate.

In this paper, we propose a conditional adversarial deep learning approach for semi-automatic manga images colorization. The system directly maps a tuple of grayscale manga page image and sparse color hint constructed by the user to an output colorization. High-quality colorization can be obtained in a fully automated way, and color hints allow users to revise the colorization of every panel independently.

We collect a dataset of manually colorized and grayscale manga images for training and evaluation. To perform supervised learning, we construct synthesized monochrome images from colorized. Furthermore, we suggest a few steps to reduce the domain gap between synthetic and real data. Their influence is evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our method can achieve even better results by fine-tuning with a small number of grayscale manga images of a new style. The code is available at github.com.

[Keywords: generative adversarial networks, manga colorization, interactive colorization]