Artistic Coloring: Color Transfer from Painting

Abstract

Color transfer is to alter an image’s color composition by reference to the color characteristics of another image. In this paper, we build a system called artistic coloring that realizes automatic color transfer from famous paintings. It properly extracts the wonderful color characteristics of famous paintings and applies them to color transfer. Specially, we investigate the traditional color theme extraction methods and find their deficiencies. Based on this, we quantify the processing of human painting to find the main colors in the color palette and propose an artistic balanced color theme extraction algorithm aimed specially at paintings. In the experiments, a user study is carried out to evaluate the artistic balanced extraction method. Our proposed method achieves the highest score 3.98 in a 5-point evaluation, which is 41% higher than traditional methods at most. We have successfully tested the artistic coloring system on lots of images with different painting styles. The results are natural and have the similar color characteristics with their corresponding reference paintings.