Computers Colouring the Collections

How an algorithm is bringing colour to our photographic collection.

[Hand painted print of Nurse Bessie McKay, Auckland Private Hospital], White, Margaret Matilda, 1868–1910, PH-1968–1–7. Auckland Museum

Colourising collection images is nothing new. For the anniversary of WWI we saw dozens of organisations releasing colourised images that encouraged audiences to engage with the collections.

Up till now, colourising black and white images has been an intense and laborious process taking hours of work. The process of colourisation is nearly as old as photography itself. The portrait of Nurse Bessie McKay is a historic, hand painted illustration of this process from last century.

I recently discovered a machine learning algorithm from Algorithmia that is helping to change that. The system was trained on one million images. It works by comparing the uploaded image to the training data and it is able to overlay what it thinks are the correct colours.

There is an online demo that lets you test a single record, but I wanted to test a large dataset. I decided to use the API and a simple python script to run 100 monochrome images through the system. The best examples are below.

Whilst the results aren't perfect, it's an interesting step forward — it takes a couple of seconds for each record and the results are passable. The next question is ‘should we?’. What are the ethical implications of colorising our collections? Colleagues have suggested that in editing the images in this way, we are risking the integrity of the original image. That because it's now in colour, people may believe it to be an authentic representation of a scene when in actual fact, the new image is less authentic. I agree with these concerns, but also believe that anything that gets people looking and engaging with our collections can’t be all bad so long as we are being transparent. Maybe one of the colourised images will spark the interest of someone who wants to dig further. With the speed of the Algorithmia system in addition to its low cost, its worth a shot.

[View of trucks carrying large rocks and a line of tents],Collins, Tudor Washington, PH-2013–7-TC-B366–06

[Young boys holding farm horses by the reins], Collins, Tudor Washington, 1898–1970, photographer,ca. 1940s?,PH-2013–7-TC-B516–09

[Car completing jump off a ramp],Collins, Tudor Washington, 1898–1970, photographer,PH-2013–7-TC-B710–19

[A crowd gathered outside three rectangular buildings in a rural area], Collins, Tudor Washington, PH-2013–7-TC-B265–06

Auckland Star. (1962) [Ballet, NZ]. Auckland War Memorial Museum neg. S783.

[Two men and dog pose in a canoe with dead ducks], Collins, Tudor Washington, PH-2013–7-TC-B402–15

[View of a coastal campsite],Collins, Tudor Washington, 1898–1970, photographer,ca. 1940s?,PH-2013–7-TC-B1139–13

You can view more of the Auckland Museum Photographic Collections using Collections Online. Auckland Museum has opened up over 300,000 images for free download.