Saliency-guided consistent color harmonization

Abstract

The focus of this paper is automatic color harmonization, which amounts to re-coloring an image so that the obtained color palette is more harmonious for human observers. The proposed automatic algorithm builds on the pioneering works described in [3,12] where templates of harmonious colors are defined on the hue wheel. We bring three contributions in this paper: first, saliency [9] is used to predict the most attractive visual areas and estimate a consistent harmonious template. Second, an efficient color segmentation algorithm, adapted from [4], is proposed to perform consistent color mapping. Third, a new mapping function substitutes usual color shifting method. Results show that the method limits the visual artifacts of state-of-the-art methods and leads to a visually consistent harmonization. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.