Local color transfer between images using dominant colors

A color-transfer method that can transfer colors of an image to another for the local regions using their dominant colors is proposed. In order to naturally transfer the colors and moods of a target image to a source image, we need to find the local regions of colors that need to be modified in the image. Since the dominant colors of each image can be used for the estimation of color regions, we develop a grid-based mode detection, which can efficiently estimate dominant colors of an image. Based on these dominant colors, our proposed method performs a consistent segmentation of source and target images by using the cost-volume filtering. Through the segmentation procedure, we can estimate complex color characteristics and transfer colors to the local regions of an image. For an intuitive and natural color transfer, region matching is also crucial. Therefore, we use the visually prominent colors in the image to meaningfully connect each segmented region in which modified color-transfer method is applied to balance the overall luminance of the final result. In the Experimental Result section, various convincing results are demonstrated through the proposed method. (C) 2013 SPIE and IS&T