Color to Gray: Attention Preservation

In this paper, we propose an approach to preserve a crucial visual cue in color to grayscale transformation: attention. The main contributions are three folds: 1) preserving visual attention is more biological plausible than preserving other low level cues, which makes our method more reasonable in theory from both biological and psychological aspects, 2) We treat the saliency map from visual attention analysis as a classifier and aim to preserve attention area in the output grayscale image. 3) A simple minimizing function toward this specific problem is established and can be easily solved. Experimental results on test images indicate that our method is both practical and effective in preserving visual attention from the original color image to corresponding grayscale image.