Region-based color transfer from multi-reference with graph-theoretic region correspondence estimation

This paper proposes an automatic color transfer method based on multi-reference and graph-theoretic region correspondence estimation. When multiple high-quality reference images are available, our goal is to determine a set of best reference colors for transferring the color characteristics of the target image. Given a target image, we first employ content-based image retrieval technique to obtain a small number of relevant images as its multi-reference. Next, we represent each image in region level and determine the best-matched reference region for each target region. We propose to incorporate both region attribute and spatially adjacent relationships between regions into the region mapping criterion. Finally, we conduct color transfer between the best-matched region pairs in a de-correlated color space. Both subjective and objective measures of our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods.