A Randomized Algorithm for Natural Object Colorization

Abstract

Natural objects often contain vivid color distribution with wide variety of colors. Conventional colorization techniques, on the other hand, produce colors that are relatively flat with little color variation. In this paper, we introduce a randomized algorithm which considers not only the value of target color but also the distribution of target color. In essence, our algorithm paints a color distribution to a region which synthesizes color distribution of a natural object. Our approach models the correlation between intensity and color in HSV color space in terms of H - S, H - V and S - V joint histogram. During the colorization process, we randomly swap and reassign color of a pixel to minimize a cost function that measures color consistency to its neighborhood and intensity-to-color correlation captured in the joint histogram. We tested our algorithm extensively on many natural objects and our user study confirms that our results are more vivid and natural compared to results from previous techniques.