There's an algorithm now to recolor the black and white pictures.
Algorithm uses a CNN to analyze the colors across a set of color images, and their black and white versions. Training data is easy to obtain here — any color image can be changed to grayscale, and then paired with its color version to make an easy training example. The algorithm uses several feed-forward passes to ultimately take in a grayscale image, and in the words of the algorithm's creators, "hallucinate" a plausible (though not necessarily correct) set of colors to fill into the image.
