TimeColor: Flexible Reference Colorization via Temporal Concatenation

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Hauptverfasser: Sadihin, Bryan Constantine, Meng, Yihao, Wang, Michael Hua, Chen, Matteo Jiahao, Su, Hang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Sadihin, Bryan Constantine
Meng, Yihao
Wang, Michael Hua
Chen, Matteo Jiahao
Su, Hang
author_facet Sadihin, Bryan Constantine
Meng, Yihao
Wang, Michael Hua
Chen, Matteo Jiahao
Su, Hang
contents Most colorization models condition only on a single reference, typically the first frame of the scene. However, this approach ignores other sources of conditional data, such as character sheets, background images, or arbitrary colorized frames. We propose TimeColor, a sketch-based video colorization model that supports heterogeneous, variable-count references with the use of explicit per-reference region assignment. TimeColor encodes references as additional latent frames which are concatenated temporally, permitting them to be processed concurrently in each diffusion step while keeping the model's parameter count fixed. TimeColor also uses spatiotemporal correspondence-masked attention to enforce subject -- reference binding in addition to modality-disjoint RoPE indexing. These mechanisms mitigate shortcutting and cross-identity palette leakage. Experiments on Sakuga-42M under both single- and multi-reference protocols show that TimeColor improves color fidelity, identity consistency, and temporal stability over prior baselines. Our project page is available at https://bconstantine.github.io/TimeColor/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_00296
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TimeColor: Flexible Reference Colorization via Temporal Concatenation
Sadihin, Bryan Constantine
Meng, Yihao
Wang, Michael Hua
Chen, Matteo Jiahao
Su, Hang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Most colorization models condition only on a single reference, typically the first frame of the scene. However, this approach ignores other sources of conditional data, such as character sheets, background images, or arbitrary colorized frames. We propose TimeColor, a sketch-based video colorization model that supports heterogeneous, variable-count references with the use of explicit per-reference region assignment. TimeColor encodes references as additional latent frames which are concatenated temporally, permitting them to be processed concurrently in each diffusion step while keeping the model's parameter count fixed. TimeColor also uses spatiotemporal correspondence-masked attention to enforce subject -- reference binding in addition to modality-disjoint RoPE indexing. These mechanisms mitigate shortcutting and cross-identity palette leakage. Experiments on Sakuga-42M under both single- and multi-reference protocols show that TimeColor improves color fidelity, identity consistency, and temporal stability over prior baselines. Our project page is available at https://bconstantine.github.io/TimeColor/.
title TimeColor: Flexible Reference Colorization via Temporal Concatenation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00296