ColouriseSG

ColouriseSG: Open-Source Colourisation Software for Singapore Historical Photos

Colourize your grayscale Singapore historical photos with deep learning-powered colourisation, now available on our open-source platform, Sugggest.

What is ColouriseSG?

ColouriseSG is an open-source software project that focuses on automatically colorizing historical grayscale photos of Singapore using deep learning techniques. It is developed by AI Singapore, a national artificial intelligence program for Singapore, in collaboration with the National Archives of Singapore.

The goal of ColouriseSG is to breathe new life into old grayscale photos by adding realistic and vibrant color while still preserving the details and essence of the original black-and-white images. This helps connect younger generations of Singaporeans with visual representations of what life was like in the past through the power of color.

On the technical side, the software utilizes generative adversarial networks (GANs) and perceptual losses to ensure the colorized images maintain textures, lighting, and the feel of the original black-and-white counterparts. Thousands of historical reference images are used to train the deep neural network powering ColouriseSG.

Since launching in 2020, ColouriseSG has colorized over 60,000 photos dated from the 1920s to the 1980s. The software, training code, and dataset are all open-source to encourage further research and development into automatic colorization and the preservation of cultural heritage.

ColouriseSG Features

Official Links