Piecewise-consistent color mappings of images acquired under various conditions

Many applications in computer vision require comparisons between two images of the same scene. Comparison applications usually assume that corresponding regions in the two images have similar colors. However, this assumption is not always true. One way to deal with this problem is to apply a color mapping to one of the images. In this paper we address the challenge of computing color mappings between pairs of images acquired under different acquisition conditions, and possibly by different cameras. For images taken from different viewpoints, our proposed method overcomes the lack of pixel correspondence. For images taken under different illumination, we show that no single color mapping exists, and we address and solve a new problem of computing a minimal set of piecewise color mappings. When both viewpoint and illumination vary, our method can only handle planar regions of the scene. In this case, the scene planar regions are simultaneously co-segmented in the two images, and piecewise color mappings for these regions are calculated. We demonstrate applications of the proposed method for each of these cases.