Deep color transfer using histogram analogy

We propose a novel approach to transferring the color of a reference image to a given source image. Although there can be diverse pairs of source and reference images in terms of content and composition similarity, previous methods are not capable of covering the whole diversity. To resolve this limitation, we propose a deep neural network that leveragescolor histogram analogyfor color transfer. A histogram contains essential color information of an image, and our network utilizes the analogy between the source and reference histograms to modulate the color of the source image with abstract color features of the reference image. In our approach, histogram analogy is exploited basically among the whole images, but it can also be applied to semantically corresponding regions in the case that the source and reference images have similar contents with different compositions. Experimental results show that our approach effectively transfers the reference colors to the source images in a variety of settings. We also demonstrate a few applications of our approach, such as palette-based recolorization, color enhancement, and color editing.