Color harmonization

ABSTRACT

Harmonic colors are sets of colors that are aesthetically pleasing in terms of human visual perception. In this paper, we present a method that enhances the harmony among the colors of a given photograph or of a general image, while remaining faithful, as much as possible, to the original colors. Given a color image, our method finds the best harmonic scheme for the image colors. It then allows a graceful shifting of hue values so as to fit the harmonic scheme while considering spatial coherence among colors of neighboring pixels using an optimization technique. The results demonstrate that our method is capable of automatically enhancing the color "look-and-feel" of an ordinary image. In particular, we show the results of harmonizing the background image to accommodate the colors of a foreground image, or the foreground with respect to the background, in a cut-and-paste setting. Our color harmonization technique proves to be useful in adjusting the colors of an image composed of several parts taken from different sources.

REFERENCES

• 1: Boykov, Y., and Jolly, M.-P. 2001. Interactive graph cuts for optimal boundary and region segmentation of objects in N-D images. In Proceedings of ICCV, 105--112.
• 2: Color Schemer, 2000. http://www.colorschemer.com/.
• 3: Color Wheel Expert, 2000. http://www.abitom.com/.
• 4: Goethe, J. v. W. 1971. Goethe's color theory. Translated by Rupprecht Matthei. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company.
• 5: Amy A. Gooch , Sven C. Olsen , Jack Tumblin , Bruce Gooch, Color2Gray: salience-preserving color removal, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.24 n.3, July 2005
• 6: Granville, W. C., and Jacobson, E. 1944. Colorimetric specification of the color harmony manual from spectrophotometric measurements. Journal of the Optical Society of America 34, 7, 382--395.
• 7: Holtzschue, L. 2002. Understanding Color. John Wiley & Sons. Inc., New York.
• 8: Ironi, R., Cohen-Or, D., and Lischinski, D. 2005. Colorization by example. In Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, 201--210.
• 9: Itten, J. 1960. The Art of Color. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company.
• 10: Jim Krause, Color Index: Over 1,000 Color Combinations, CMYK and RGB Formulas, for Print and Web Media, F & W Publications, Incorporated, 2002
• 11: Anat Levin , Dani Lischinski , Yair Weiss, Colorization using optimization, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.23 n.3, August 2004
• 12: Matsuda, Y. 1995. Color design. Asakura Shoten. (in Japanese).
• 13: Barbara J. Meier, ACE: a color expert system for user interface design, Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on User Interface Software, p.117-128, October 17-19, 1988, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/62402.62424]
• 14: Moon, P., and Spencer, D. E. 1944. Geometrical formulation of classical color harmony. Journal of the Optical Society of America 34, 1, 46--60.
• 15: Morovic, J., and Luo, M. R. 2001. The fundamentals of gamut mapping: A survey. Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 45, 3, 283--290.
• 16: Munsell, A. H. 1969. A Grammar of Colors. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company.
• 17: Frank Nack , Amit Manniesing , Lynda Hardman, Colour picking: the pecking prder of form and function, Proceedings of the eleventh ACM international conference on Multimedia, November 02-08, 2003, Berkeley, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/957013.957071]
• 18: Ostwald, W., and Birren, F. 1969. The Color Primer. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company.
• 19: William H. Press , Saul A. Teukolsky , William T. Vetterling , Brian P. Flannery, Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1992
• 20: Rasche, K., Geist, R., and Westall, J. 2005. Re-coloring images for gamuts of lower dimension. Computer Graphics Forum 24, 3, 423--432.
• 21: Erik Reinhard , Michael Ashikhmin , Bruce Gooch , Peter Shirley, Color Transfer between Images, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.21 n.5, p.34-41, September 2001
• 22: Tokumaru, M., Muranaka, N., and Imanishi, S. 2002. Color design support system considering color harmony. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, IEEE Press, 378--383.
• 23: Tomihisa Welsh , Michael Ashikhmin , Klaus Mueller, Transferring color to greyscale images, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.21 n.3, July 2002

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Color, shading, shadowing, and texture

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.10 Vision and Scene Understanding
            Subjects: Intensity, color, photometry, and thresholding

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design

Keywords:
color harmonization, computational aesthetics, cut-and-paste, image enhancement