Color transfer method preserving perceived lightness

Color transfer originally proposed by Reinhard et al. is a method to change the color appearance of an input image by using the color information of a reference image. The purpose of this study is to modify color transfer so that it works well even when the scenes of the input and reference images are not similar. Concretely, a color transfer method with lightness correction and color gamut adjustment is proposed. The lightness correction is applied to preserve the perceived lightness which is explained by the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch (H–K) effect. This effect is the phenomenon that vivid colors are perceived as brighter than dull colors with the same lightness. Hence, when the chroma is changed by image processing, the perceived lightness is also changed even if the physical lightness is preserved after the image processing. In the proposed method, by considering the H–K effect, color transfer that preserves the perceived lightness after processing is realized. Furthermore, color gamut adjustment is introduced to address the color gamut problem, which is caused by color space conversion. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by performing some experiments.