Abstract. Multi-view video is a new video application requiring efficient coding algorithm to compress the huge data, while the color variations among different viewpoints deteriorate the visual quality of multiview video. This paper deals with these two problems simultaneously focusing on color. With the spatial block-matching information from multi-view video coding, color annotated images can be produced given gray input in one view and color input in another view. Then the color images are rendered from colorization process. By discarding most of the chrominance information before encoding and restoring them when decoding, this novel scheme can greatly improve the compression rate without much loss in visual quality, while at the same time produce color images with similar appearance to reference without correction.