Example-based video color transfer

Abstract

Color transfer is an image processing technique commonly used to fix images with wrong colors, enhance the lighting conditions, or produce special styles to express specific emotions. With the aid of a reference image, the intended color characteristics can be properly transferred to the source images or videos. Since the applications start growing popular, many image color transfer methods have emerged; However, only few video color transfer algorithms have been proposed so far. In this paper, we propose an efficient example-based color transfer algorithm for both images and videos, which preserves the gradient details of the source by building Laplacian pyramids and improves the spatio-temporal consistency by employing patch matching method. Other than the existing quality metrics, we further propose a video quality metric regarding temporal consistency and compare our algorithm with other color transfer methods. The experimental results show that our algorithm generally produces outputs with high fidelity in terms of colors, scene details, and also spatiotemporal consistency.