Selective color transferring via ellipsoid color mixture map

Abstract

Color transfer among images is a natural phenomenon and important research topic in interactive graphics and augmented environments. Most of the conventional methods need complex user interactions and difficult image segmentation. Motivated for the intuitive use of color editing tools, this paper presents a simple but effective ellipsoid color mixture map to realize selective color transfers. Our approach proposes ellipsoid hulls to represent color statistics of the images. Based on the window-click input, the system computes the ellipsoid hulls of the source and target images respectively. The color mixture map is generated to determine the blending weight of pixels in the output image, according to the color and distance information instead of using image segmentation. By mixing the images using the color mixture map, the final results we produce have the source color selected realistically spreading on the structures related to the target window. Our selective color transferring approach is efficient and simple to use, and widely applicable for images and also video sequences without the need of addition interaction. Our experimental results have showed the high-quality visual effects and efficiency of image/video color transfers.