The primary goal of image decomposition is to decompose an observed image into several independent components, which can be further manipulated to carry out more complex tasks effectively. Existing image decomposition methods apply a decomposition model either to each of the three channels separately in RGB color space, or to the intensity channel only in other color spaces, which leads to color error or unintuitive display. To address these issues, this paper proposes a color image decomposition model that acts directly on color images and yields visually piecewise smoothing base information, low/high contrast detail information, and rich color information. Specifically, the color information with characteristics of spherical geometry is separated by a spatial transformation at first. Then, the separation of base and detail information from a given image is achieved by combining low-rank approximation and the relative total variation with no artifacts. After yielding the three components via our decomposition model, we exploit the automatic arc tangent transformation and the visual saliency principle to implement two applications, contrast enhancement and infrared image fusion, respectively. We demonstrate the remarkable performance of our method through a reasonable qualitative and quantitative analysis of the experimental results.
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