Multi-source color transfer for natural images

Considering a "target" image with complex scene, a novel method for regionally transferring colors from a set of "source" color images to the complex "target" image is presented. An improved EM (expectation-maximization) algorithm is first adopted to approximately model the regional color distribution of the target image by using Gaussian mixture model (GMM); trained by this target GMM, color pixels in each source image are then assigned into source regions corresponding to the target ones, and a color selection mechanism is proposed to choose the best- matched source colors for re-coloring each target region. A new image quality metric, colorfulness, is adopted for objective performance comparisons with previous methods. Experiments show that the proposed method can generate convincing results with well performance.