Color Harmonization, Deharmonization and Balancing in Augmented Reality

Color schemes play a crucial role in blending virtual objects with the real environment. Good color schemes improve user’s perception, which is of crucial importance for augmented reality. In this paper, we propose a set of novel methods based on the color harmonization methodology to recolor augmented reality content according to the real background. Three different strategies are proposed—harmonic, disharmonic, and balance—that allow for satisfying different needs in different settings depending on the application field. The first approach aims to harmonize the colors of virtual objects to make them consistent with the colors of the real background and reach a more pleasing effect to a human eye. The second approach, instead, can be adopted to generate a set of disharmonious colors with respect to real ones to be associated with the augmented virtual content to improve its distinctiveness from the real background. The third approach balances these goals by achieving a compromise between harmony and good visibility among virtual and real objects. Furthermore, the proposed re-coloring method is applied to three different case studies by adopting the three strategies to meet three different objectives, which are specific for each case study. Several parameters are calculated for each test, such as the covered area, the color distribution, and the set of generated colors. Results confirm the great potential of the proposed approaches to improve the AR visualization in different scenarios.