Contrast Preserving Decolorization

Cewu Lu              Li Xu              Jiaya Jia

Color Image	CIE Y	Decolorized Image (Chrominance contrast is preserved)

Abstract

Decolorization - the process to transform a color image to a grayscale one - is a basic tool in digital printing, stylized black-and-white photography, and in many single channel image processing applications.

We propose an optimization approach aiming at maximally preserving the original color contrast. Our main contribution is to alleviate a strict order constraint for color mapping based on human vision system, which enables the employment of a bimodal distribution to constrain spatial pixel difference and allows for automatic selection of suitable gray scale in order to preserve the original contrast.

Downloads

"Contrast Preserving Decolorization" Cewu Lu, Li Xu, Jiaya Jia IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP), 2012    [Paper (pdf, 4.9MB)]   Code included in OpenCV since version 3.0   [Image Data and Results (zip, 5.5M)]   [Presentation Slides]

"Contrast Preserving Decolorization with Perception-Based Quality Metrics" Cewu Lu, Li Xu, Jiaya Jia International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2014    [Paper (pdf, 5MB)]   [Metric Code (CCPR, CCFR and E-score)]   [COLOR250 Dataset (181MB)]

Related Projects

• Combining Sketch and Tone for Pencil Drawing Production

• L0 Image Smoothing

• L0 Deblurring

• Relative Total Variation

Examples and Comparison

Color Image	CIE Y	Decolorized Image (Chrominance contrast is preserved)