Color transfer for complex content images based on intrinsic component

This paper proposes an automatic color transfer method for processing images with complex content based on intrinsic component. Although several automatic color transfer methods has been proposed by including region information and/or using multiple references, these methods tend to become ineffective when processing images with complex content and lighting variation. In this paper, our goal is to incorporate the idea of intrinsic component to better characterize the local organization within an image and to reduce the color-bleeding artifact across complex regions. Using intrinsic information, we first represent each image in region level and determine the best-matched reference region for each target region. Next, we conduct color transfer between the best-matched region pairs and perform weighted color transfer for pixels across complex regions in a de-correlated color space. Both subjective and objective evaluation of our experiments demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods.