Saliency-aware inter-image color transfer for image manipulation

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel saliency-aware inter-image color transfer method to perform image manipulation. Specifically, given the source image, the candidate images are first retrieved from a group of images with the same semantic category, and the corresponding saliency maps are obtained using an existing saliency model. Then, the inter-image color transfer method is proposed to transfer the colors of the high-saliency region in each candidate image to the target object region in the source image, for generating the manipulated image. Finally, from a set of manipulated images, the one with the highest weighted F-measure of its saliency map is selected as the final result. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only highlights objects effectively but also preserves the naturalness of images well, and consistently outperforms other image manipulation methods when viewing the manipulated images with or without the source image as the reference.