A Survey of Color Mapping and its Applications

Color mapping or color transfer methods aim to recolor a given image or video by deriving a mapping between that image and another image serving as a reference. This class of methods has received considerable attention in recent years, both in academic literature and in industrial applications. Methods for recoloring images have often appeared under the labels of color correction, color transfer or color balancing, to name a few, but their goal is always the same: mapping the colors of one image to another. In this report, we present a comprehensive overview of these methods and offer a classification of current solutions depending not only on their algorithmic formulation but also their range of applications. We discuss the relative merit of each class of techniques through examples and show how color mapping solutions can and have been applied to a diverse range of problems.