Illuminant Aware Gamut-Based Color Transfer

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 33; no. 7; pp. 319 - 328
• Main Authors: Nguyen, R. M. H., Kim, S. J., Brown, M. S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.10.2014
• Subjects: Analysis; Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS); Computer graphics; I.3.m [Computer Graphics]: Computational Photography- Image Processing; Image processing systems; Studies
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12500

This paper proposes a new approach for color transfer between two images. Our method is unique in its consideration of the scene illumination and the constraint that the mapped image must be within the color gamut of the target image. Specifically, our approach first performs a white‐balance step on both images to remove color casts caused by different illuminations in the source and target image. We then align each image to share the same ‘white axis’ and perform a gradient preserving histogram matching technique along this axis to match the tone distribution between the two images. We show that this illuminant‐aware strategy gives a better result than directly working with the original source and target image's luminance channel as done by many previous methods. Afterwards, our method performs a full gamut‐based mapping technique rather than processing each channel separately. This guarantees that the colors of our transferred image lie within the target gamut. Our experimental results show that this combined illuminant‐aware and gamut‐based strategy produces more compelling results than previous methods. We detail our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness on a number of examples.