With TensorFlow, I want to train an object detection model with my own images based on ssd_inception_v2_coco model. The problem I have is that all my pictures are black and white. What performance can I expect? Should I try to colorize my B&W pictures first? Or at the opposite, should I try to retrain base network with images "uncolorized"? Are there general guidelines for B&W processing of images for deep learning object detection?
I wouldn't go through the trouble of colorizing if you are planning on using a pretrained model. I would expect that explicitly colorizing your images as a pre-processing step would help very little (if at all) since in theory the features that a colorizing network learns can also be learned by the detection network.
If you are planning on pretraining your detection network that was trained on an RGB dataset, make sure you either (i) replace the first convolution in the network with a convolutional layer that expects a single-channel input, or (ii) pad your image with two all-zero channels.
You may get slightly worse detection performance simply because you lose two thirds of the image's pixel information when using BW instead of RGB.