AI colorized photos of independence heroes at Gwanghwamun plaza

Primary patriots who committed themselves to Korea’s liberation greet people today in full-color photos at Gwanghwamun Plaza in downtown Seoul, Wednesday.

The Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs on Tuesday began displaying the patriots’ portraits on a billboard outside the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, after bringing color to the original black-and-white, damaged photos with the Generative Facial Prior-Generative Adversarial Network based on artificial intelligence.

The GFP-GAN completed the images of 15 patriots who made painstaking efforts to end Japan’s colonization of Korea in the early 20th century: Kim Koo, Kim Chwa-chin, Bethell, Song Jin-woo, Ahn Jung-geun, Ahn Chang-ho, Yu Gwan-sun, Yun Dong-ju, Syngman Rhee, Lee Hoe-young, Cho So-ang, Choi Jae-hyung, Han Yong-un and Hulbert. The AI referenced other samples of their portraits.

The Veterans Ministry and students majoring in software and artificial intelligence at Sungkyunkwan University cooperated in the photo restoration project.

The project is being carried out to celebrate the 104th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement, a nationwide uprising in 1919 against Japan's colonial rule from 1910 to 1945.

The display will run through April 11, the day when the Korean provisional government was established in Shanghai, China, in the same year of the March 1 movement.

Accompanying the photos are brief explanations of the figures and quotations.

The Veterans Ministry is to continue the photo restoration project by working on photos of heroes of the 1950-53 Korean War, the ministry announced Tuesday.