A new color transfer quality measure

Abstract

Color transfer changes the color contents of a target image by replacing the colors in the target image with colors from another source image. The target image will be repainted/recolored to exhibit the same ambience as the source image. Color transfer is applicable to a wide range of commercial image processing tools and products. While much outstanding research has been conducted on this subject, judging the performance of the recoloring process remains subjective to human evaluation. To obtain an objective quantitative assessment of recoloring algorithms’ performance, a new color transfer quality measure is proposed. In this paper, we will first establish the requirements that a good color transfer quality measure should meet. Then, according to these requirements, a new color transfer quality measure is proposed that focuses on measuring the content similarity between a target image and a resulting recolored output image, and the color similarity between the source image and the output image. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed measure, the subjective human perception Mean Opinion Score (MOS) values are used. The high correlation between MOS and the proposed measure demonstrate the measure’s performance and demonstrate that it exhibits high consistency with human perception.