Imagine the streets of New York City at the turn of the 20th century. Horse-drawn buggies share the road with brightly colored automobiles. Women, donning large bustles and matching millinery, amble beside their suited beaus as they make their way into department stores. Now you can see these historic scenes (and many more) brought to colorful life thanks to YouTuber Denis Shirayaev and his work spent restoring a short black-and-white film titled A Trip Through New York City. Also known as New York 1911, the footage documents everyday life in the Big Apple as captured by the Swedish newsreel company Svenska Biografteatern.

A team out of Waseda University in Japan has unveiled some pretty cool images from the first half of the 20th century, given new depth with full colorization thanks to an artificial intelligence. Unlike colorizing black and white photos using software, which can be a lengthy process of repeated cleaning and coloring – this AI samples similar photos and applies those colors and tones to the photo at hand. So, for example, if you have an old black and white photo of your grandparent's house – and that house is still standing today – you can take a photo of it and the AI will learn how to color the old photo based on the tones and levels from the modern day one. Similarly, if you have an old photo of an area or people that don't exist, the program can still learn and adapt those colors from similarly colored images. The more photos and images it has to pull from, the greater detail and true to color matching it will be able to provide.