AI brings color to fading scenes of old Beijing

People dressed in traditional attire greeting each other with bows, traveling on rickshaws and praying at a temple ... what life was like for Beijingers a century ago was captured in rare black-and-white footage.

Using artificial intelligence technology, Hu Wengu, a 29-year-old artist and game developer, colorized and sharpened the monochromatic and blurred footage, giving modern folk an intriguing glimpse at life in the capital long ago.

“I was born and raised in Beijing. It has been my dream to restore and colorize old black-and-white videos about this ancient city,” said Hu.

Hu started using AI technology to develop games in late 2019. During the process, he developed a deeper understanding of its wide applications such as generating artificial faces, composing music and colorizing grainy old films.

Film colorization has existed for decades, but the traditional hand-crafted process is tedious, slow and expensive. Advances in AI can convert monochromatic images into vibrant color and turn blurred footage into clear video, all on its own.

It usually takes Hu up to two weeks to restore a five-minute video with the help of several pieces of AI-powered computer software.

For example, a coloring AI tool, based on machine learning algorithms, can build an understanding of how objects are usually colored and paint the old colorless films with hues.

With AI technology, low-resolution images in films can also be automatically upscaled into high-resolution versions.

Although AI technology improves the efficiency of traditional film restoration techniques, technology is not a cure-all for artistic works like movies. Manual efforts are still required when AI fails to produce authentic color or fluid pictures.

For Hu, one of the highlights of film restoration is exploring history with his followers online and allowing more people to understand the value of these old clips which record the development of an era.

Old films decay over the years, leading to blurred images and fuzzy sound. Some even crack into pieces and cannot be screened again.

In a piece of black-and-white footage on Beijing life in 1929, a shaver wrapped a white towel around a man’s neck and gave him a tray to catch the falling hairs. Minutes later, the customer patted his shaved head with a big smile, exclaiming, “That’s good!”

If not for Hu, the clips would still sleep silently in a university in the United States. Now the restored footage has drawn millions of views on social media platforms, and modern folk can see the vibrant hues and vivid looks on the faces of their forebears.