Colour Transfer by Feature Based Histogram Registration

This paper addresses the problem of automatically eliminating unwanted colour variation between similar image pairs. We propose a feature-based registration method to align colour histograms without any spatial processing of the image content or assumptions about the scene contents. We use the method for the colour transfer problem. The features are histogram maxima that persist through the scale space, so they are robust to large changes in the sizes of objects in the scene. The algorithm seeks the best matches between features and aligns the histograms via a polynomial warp. We construct a set of image pairs that exhibit variation in object scale and lighting and use it to show that the method produces better colour space alignments than simple alignments of histogram moments.