Selective color tone adjustment for advanced television systems

One of the subtle problems in color image processing is the difficulty of adjusting specific color tones in the image without affecting all other colors. The usual method is to adjust the primaries so as to produce as realistic as possible skin tones, and at the same time balance the rest of the colors dose to their natural appearances. The reality, however, is that a balance of all color tones to their natural appearances by just adjusting the three primaries is not always a possible task. An alternative approach is to selectively adjust specific color tones without altering the color balance in the rest of the image. Such a scheme can be referred to as selective color tone adjustment. It is also possible to selectively sharpen or blur a specific color by selective color filtering. One application of this method is in the production of true-to-life colors in television systems. Other applications could include special effects such as soft blur or color change of specific subjects, etc. The authors present a scheme for color classification and examine its application in selective color tone adjustment