Image recoloring for color vision deficiency compensation using Swin transformer

Abstract

People with color vision deficiency (CVD) have difficulty in distinguishing differences between colors. To compensate for the loss of color contrast experienced by CVD individuals, a lot of image recoloring approaches have been proposed. However, the state-of-the-art methods suffer from the failures of simultaneously enhancing color contrast and preserving naturalness of colors [without reducing the Quality of Vision (QOV)], high computational cost, etc. In this paper, we propose an image recoloring method using deep neural network, whose loss function takes into consideration the naturalness and contrast, and the network is trained in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, Swin transformer layer, which has long-range dependency mechanism, is adopted in the proposed method. At the same time, a dataset, which contains confusing color pairs to CVD individuals, is newly collected in this study. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, quantitative and subjective experiments have been conducted. The experimental results showed that the proposed method is competitive to the state-of-the-art methods in contrast enhancement and naturalness preservation and has a real-time advantage. The code and model will be made available at https://github.com/Ligeng-c/CVD_swin.