A team of researchers at Hebrew University in Israel have developed what seems to be a fast and simple way to colorize black and white still images and movies. This may be good news or bad, depending on which side of the ‘art is art’ divide you come from.
A major difficulty with colorization has been its labor-intensiveness. For example, in order to colorize a still image an artist typically begins by dividing the image into regions, and then proceeds to assign a color to each region… After a year of development Dr. Lischinski, Dr. Weiss and Levin created a new interactive colorization process that does not require precise, manual, region detection, nor accurate tracking. The new process is based on the simple premise that nearby pixels in space and time that have similar gray levels should also have similar colors.