Color Transfer with Salient Features Mapping via Attention Maps between Images

Abstract

Color transfer is a useful image editing technology that transfers the color style of a reference image to a source image. In this paper, a novel automatic perception color transfer method based on salient features mapping was proposed. Firstly, the saliency maps of the reference image and source image are built to predict the human visual attention regions. Secondly, the gradient map is calculated by convolving the image pair with Sobel filter. Thirdly, the saliency map and gradient map are combined to produce a weighted attention map. Fourthly, by thresholding the attention map the reference image and the source image are segmented into regions of salient and non-salient pixels, and mean and standard deviation of these two regions are calculated in the three channels of the YUV space, respectively. Finally, on the salient and non-salient pixels an execution similar to Reinhard's is performed, and the two results are combined to generate the final output. The experiments result show the superiority of our method by its pleasant natural appearance with color similarity and image details preservation, high time efficiency and easy implementation.