Near-infrared Image Colorization Method Based on a Dilated Global Attention Mechanism

A new generative adversarial network method is proposed for colorization of near-infrared (NIR) images, because current convolutional neural networks fail to fully extract the shallow feature information of images. This failure leads to miscoloring of the local area of the resultant image and blurring due to unstable network training. First, a self-designed dilated global attention module was introduced into the generator residual block to identify each position of the NIR image accurately and improve the local region miscoloring problem. Second, in the discriminative network, the batch normalization layer was replaced with a gradient normalization layer to enhance the network discriminative performance and improve the blurring problem caused by the colorized image generation process. Finally, the algorithms used in this study are compared qualitatively and quantitatively using the RGB_NIR dataset. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can fully extract the shallow information features of NIR images and improve the structural similarity by 0.044, PSNR by 0.835, and LPILS by 0.021 compared to other colorization algorithms.