Content-Based Color Transfer

This paper presents a novel content-based method for transferring the color patterns between images. Unlike previous methods that rely on image color statistics, our method puts an emphasis on high level scene content analysis. We first automatically extract the foreground subject areas and background scene layout from the scene. The semantic correspondences of the regions between source and target images are established. In the second step, the source image is re-colored in a novel optimization framework, which incorporates the extracted content information and the spatial distributions of the target color styles. A new progressive transfer scheme is proposed to integrate the advantages of both global and local transfer algorithms, as well as avoid the over-segmentation artifact in the result. Experiments show that, with a better understanding of the scene contents, our method well preserves the spatial layout, the color distribution and the visual coherence in the transfer process. As an interesting extension, our method can also be used to re-color video clips with spatially-varied color effects.