Palette-based Color Transfer for Images and Videos

In this paper, we introduce an enhanced color palette characterized by a heightened level of representativeness for images. This palette is not only easy to compute but also effectively conveys the distribution of pixels across the color space. Based on the proposed color palette, we present a tailored color palette matching algorithm designed for image color transfer by solving an optimization problem to transfer colors from a reference image to the original image. Our algorithm offers the flexibility to operate in fully automatic mode or provide various levels of user interactivity, allowing for coarse-to-fine editing. Moreover, we demonstrate the adaptability of our color palette and color transfer algorithm to diverse applications, including grayscale image colorization and temporally consistent, time-varying video color transfer. Extensive experiments and comparisons have been conducted to measure the quality of our results, employing both visual assessments and evaluation metrics. These findings demonstrate that our algorithm efficiently and faithfully transfers color styles from reference images to both color and grayscale images and videos.