An Efficient Color Transfer Algorithm for Recoloring Multiband Night Vision Imagery

摘要

A color transfer method is presented to give fused multiband nighttime imagery a natural daytime color appearance in a simple and efficient way. Instead of using the traditional nonlinear lαβ space, the proposed method transfers the color distribution of the target image (daylight color image) to the source image (fused multiband nighttime imagery) in the linear YC_BC_R color space. The YC_BC_R transformation is simpler and more suitable for image fusion compared to the lαβ conversion. The YC_BC_R transformation can be extended into a general formalism. And the paper mathematically proves that, for color transfer, using color spaces conforming to this general YC_BC_R space framework can produce same recoloring results as using the YC_BC_R space. Experimental results demonstrate that the YC_BC_R based color transfer method works surprisingly well for transferring natural color characteristics of daylight color images to false color fused multiband nighttime imagery, and moreover, can also be successfully applied to recoloring a variety of color images.