A unified fidelity optimization model for global color transfer

Generally, for a global or local color transfer, the traditional approaches will rearrange color distribution in source image according to reference image. However, the destruction of scene detail and illumination environment might produce a low-fidelity color transfer result. In this paper, we propose a unified fidelity optimization model for color transfer to yield a high-fidelity transfer result in terms of color, detail and illumination. Corresponding to the three characteristics, our approach is described as an optimization problem with three energy terms: color mapping, detail preserving and illumination awareness. Color mapping can employ histogram matching to impose the color style of reference image on source image; Detail preserving can apply gradient guidance to maintain scene detail in source image; Illumination awareness can construct illumination affinity to harmonize illumination environment. Moreover, following the definition of fidelity with three characteristics, we also propose an objective evaluation metric to analyze the performance of our approach in different coefficients. The comparison of experiment results demonstrates the effectiveness of our optimization model.