L0 Gradient-Preserving Color Transfer

This paper presents a new two-step color transfer method which includes color mapping and detail preservation. To map source colors to target colors, which are from an image or palette, the proposed similarity-preserving color mapping algorithm uses the similarities between pixel color and dominant colors as existing algorithms and emphasizes the similarities between source image pixel colors. Detail preservation is performed by an L0 gradient-preserving algorithm. It relaxes the large gradients of the sparse pixels along color region boundaries and preserves the small gradients of pixels within color regions. The proposed method preserves source image color similarity and image details well. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach has achieved a state-of-art visual performance.