Style-aware robust color transfer

Transferring features, such as light and colors, between input and reference images is the main objective of color transfer methods. Current state-of-the-art methods focus mainly on the complete transfer of the light and color distributions. However, they do not successfully grasp specific light and color variations in image styles. In this paper, we propose a local method for carrying out a transfer of style between two images. Our method partitions both images to Gaussian distributed clusters by considering their main style features. These features are automatically determined by the classification step of our algorithm. Moreover, we present several novel policies for input/reference cluster mapping, which have not been tackled so far by previous methods. To complete the style transfer, for each pair of corresponding clusters, we apply a parametric color transfer method and a local chromatic adaptation transform. Results, subjective user evaluation as well as objective evaluation show that the proposed method obtains visually pleasing and artifact-free images, respecting the reference style.