Temporal-Consistency-Aware Video Color Transfer

This paper proposes a new temporal-consistency-aware color transfer method based on quaternion distance metric. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our method can keep the temporal consistency and better reduce the artifacts. Firstly, keyframes are extracted from the source video and transfer the color from the reference image through soft segmentation based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). Then a quaternion-based method is proposed to transfer color from keyframes to the other frames iteratively. Specifically, this method analyses the color information of each pixel along five directions to detect its best matching pixel through a quaternion-based distance metric. Additionally, considering the accumulating errors in frame sequences, an effective abnormal color correction mechanism is designed to improve the color transfer quality. A quantitative evaluation metric is further proposed to measure the temporal consistency in the output video. Various experimental results validate the effectiveness of our method.