How AI helped Australians see our war time history in colour

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Behind the News: Adam Makarucha, Chrispin Gray, and Ben Swinney share how IBM’s advanced AI running on IBM Power Systems has brought WWI and WWII photos to life, profiled by News Corp for Anzac Day 2020.

In homes all over Australia and New Zealand – in well-worn picture frames and treasured dog-eared family albums – are photographs of relatives in active service during WWI and WWII.

These irreplaceable black and white images are often faded by time. Our task, in a joint project between News Corp and IBM, was to ensure they didn’t fade from memory.

It all began on 12 April this year, with an article in The Sunday Telegraph entitled ‘Time to dig out your Digger pictures’. It featured two photos submitted by Cheryl Creasy and colourised by IBM – one of her father-in-law Leslie Douglas Creasy of the 2^nd Australian Imperial Force, taken in 1941, and one of his father Benjamin Creasy of the Royal Army Service Corp, taken in 1915.

Benjamin enlisted at the age of 20 years old. While serving in France he met a nurse and ambulance driver by the name of Edith Jennison. They married a month after the armistice in December 1918, in Nottinghamshire, UK. And Leslie came along the following year.

Leslie signed up in December 1941 with the Australian Ambulance Service Corp 1^st Australian Division and trained in the infantry. 22-year old Leslie found himself preparing for a Japanese invasion that never came. And, like his father, found himself guarding prisoners of war.

Upon returning home, Leslie married and had four sons – one of whom is Robert, who has been married to Cheryl for 46 years.

The article was touching, motivating readers of The Sunday Telegraph to send in their photos of family members who were in the services during WWI and WWII. They received hundreds and hundreds.

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: Photo of Keith Wheeler (2nd row on far left with arms folded) pictured in the Pacific during WWII. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Using an advanced machine learning approach, we set to work to remaster and colourise these precious images. To ensure we were able to produce the most accurately coloured images of these wartime heroes, we trained state-of-the-art open-source AI models with as much colour Anzac imagery as we could find, pushing these models to the limits of depth and resolution with IBM’s high-performance GPU accelerated hardware.

Traditionally, bringing old images to life by colourisation has been done manually. It’s slow work. But by using these state-of-the-art AI models, we were able to automatically colourise images in seconds. Which is quite an improvement over the many hours required to do it manually.

With AI colourisation, all those fleeting moments captured on film would be seen as they were a lifetime ago by the naked eye – in colour.

On 26 April, The Sunday Telegraph published a 24-page Anzac Day Special Edition wrap around, titled ‘The Heroes Next Door’.

On the cover was an enhanced photograph that truly represents the Anzac spirit, submitted by Ann Wardrop and Bill Wheeler of Malabar. It shows their father Corporal Leslie Keith Wheeler 2/2^nd Pioneer Battalion AIF (middle row far left), with his mates in Borneo in 1944. He enlisted in 1942 and died in Borneo on 14 November 1945, two months and a day after the Japanese surrender. He was 28 years old.

It has been our privilege to work on this project. What is especially rewarding is that we were able to help bring Australians a little bit closer to their relatives who had served in the armed forces at a time when Anzac ceremonies across Australia and New Zealand were cancelled due to new social distancing rules.

Technology helped Australians to commemorate Anzac Day in a different way this year.

Author: Ben Swinney, AI Platform Engineer, IBM Systems Lab Services, IBM