Neural Network Taught to Turn Sketches into Color Photographs

A team of scientists from Radboud University Nijmegen developed a neural network that can recreate color photographs by sketches, N+1 writes.

When teaching the algorithm, its creators analyzed about 200,000 portraits of people which they later turned to contour black-and-white or color sketches. A neural network had to turn a sketch into a realistic photograph that could have been taken by a regular camera.

The study results showed that photographs made based on the sketches with only the contours of the face turned out the best, while black-and-white sketches produces photographs that were the least like their originals.

According to the scientists, their program could be used, for instance, for recreating portraits of famous painters who left no photographs behind, or for creating photographs based on composite sketches of offenders.