Color transfer based on cartoon decomposition and efficient illuminant estimation

Abstract

The traditional color transfer method does not consider the influence of the light source of the reference image well, which is easy to cause problems such as poor visual effect and fuzzy texture details in the resulting image. To solve these problems, a color transfer method combining cartoon decomposition and illuminant estimation is proposed in this paper. Firstly, considering that the resulting image is easily affected by the brightness of the reference image illuminant, an efficient illuminant estimation for color constancy using grey pixels is introduced to alleviate the influence of the reference image on the resulting image. Secondly, to better preserve the texture details of the source image, the cartoon decomposition is used to decompose the source and reference images into a texture part containing the main details and a cartoon part containing the main contour structure. Finally, a full color gamut mapping technique is executed on the cartoon portion of the source and reference images to complete the color transfer. The experimental results show that the proposed method can not only effectively maintain the texture details of the source image but also achieve good results in terms of objective evaluation indexes, compared with the traditional color migration method, while achieving better visual effects.