Local texture-based color transfer and colorization

•A texture-based framework for automatic color transfer and colorization.•An edge-aware texture descriptor based on multiscale gradient descent.•Stroke based edition for local color manipulation based on textures.

This paper targets two related color manipulation problems: Color transfer for modifying an image׳s colors and colorization for adding colors to a grayscale image. Automatic methods for these two applications propose to modify the input image using a reference that contains the desired colors. Previous approaches usually do not target both applications and suffer from two main limitations: possible misleading associations between input and reference regions and poor spatial coherence around image structures. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that uses the textural content of the images to guide the color transfer and colorization. Our method introduces an edge-aware texture descriptor based on region covariance, allowing for local color transformations. We show that our approach is able to produce results comparable or better than state-of-the-art methods in both applications.

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