Color transfer in correlated color space

In this paper we present a process called color transfer which can borrow one image's color characteristics from another. Recently Reinhard and his colleagues reported a pioneering work of color transfer. Their technology can produce very believable results, but has to transform pixel values from RGB to lαΒ. Inspired by their work, we advise an approach which can directly deal with the color transfer in any 3D space.From the view of statistics, we consider pixel's value as a three-dimension stochastic variable and an image as a set of samples, so the correlations between three components can be measured by covariance. Our method imports covariance between three components of pixel values while calculate the mean along each of the three axes. Then we decompose the covariance matrix using SVD algorithm and get a rotation matrix. Finally we can scale, rotate and shift pixel data of target image to fit data points' cluster of source image in the current color space and get resultant image which takes on source image's look and feel. Besides the global processing, a swatch-based method is introduced in order to manipulate images' color more elaborately. Experimental results confirm the validity and usefulness of our method.