Region-Based Color Transfer for Complex Content Images Using Intrinsic Component

Abstract

This paper proposes an automatic color transfer method for complex content images. When given one or more high-quality reference images, our goal is to determine a set of best reference colors for transferring their color characteristics into the target image. Although several automatic color transfer methods have been proposed, there usually exists visible and unnatural artifact when processing images with complex content and lighting variation. In this paper, we represent each image in region level and propose to incorporate region attribute, region connectivity and intrinsic reflectivity to characterize the local organization within an image. We then determine the best-matched reference region for each target region using the proposed graph-theoretic region correspondence estimation. After determining the set of reference regions, we next conduct color transfer between the best-matched region pairs in a de-correlated color space. In order to reduce artifact across complex regions, we further propose a weighted color transfer in terms of intrinsic component. Both subjective and objective evaluation of our experiments demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms existing methods.