  We present a novel approach to automatic image colorization by imitating the
imagination process of human experts. Our imagination module is designed to
generate color images that are context-correlated with black-and-white photos.
Given a black-and-white image, our imagination module firstly extracts the
context information, which is then used to synthesize colorful and diverse
images using a conditional image synthesis network (e.g., semantic image
synthesis model). We then design a colorization module to colorize the
black-and-white images with the guidance of imagination for photorealistic
colorization. Experimental results show that our work produces more colorful
and diverse results than state-of-the-art image colorization methods. Our
source codes will be publicly available.
