Using machine learning to color cartoons

A big problem with supervised machine learning is the need for huge amounts of labeled data. It's a big problem especially if you don't have the labeled data--and even in a world awash with big data, most of us don't. Although a few companies have access to enormous quantities of certain kinds of labeled data, for most organizations and many applications, creating sufficient quantities of the right kind of labeled data is cost prohibitive or impossible. Sometimes the domain is one in which there just isn't much data (for example, when diagnosing a rare disease or determining whether a signature matches a few known exemplars). Other times the volume of data needed multiplied by the cost of human labeling by Amazon Turkers or summer interns is just too high.