Image-Based Color Schemes

This paper presents a novel method for generating color schemes based on images intended to anchor color designs. This has wide applicability for Web pages, printed materials, or other applications where images are used as a key part of the overall design. Unlike methods that are variants of color quantization and try to pixel-wise approximate the image, this method draws on graphic-design principles by emphasizing hue selection first, weighting effects of color by saturation, and considering the local spatial coherency in order to determine the overall visual impact of a color. Results demonstrate that the method generalizes to a wide range of images, choosing visually important elements of the coloration of the source image.