Contrast preserving decolorization

Decolorization - the process to transform a color image to a grayscale one - is a basic tool in digital printing, stylized black-and-white photography, and in many single channel image processing applications. In this paper, we propose an optimization approach aiming at maximally preserving the original color contrast. Our main contribution is to alleviate a strict order constraint for color mapping based on human vision system, which enables the employment of a bimodal distribution to constrain spatial pixel difference and allows for automatic selection of suitable gray scale in order to preserve the original contrast. Both the quantitative and qualitative evaluation bears out the effectiveness of the proposed method.