Contrast-Aware Color Consistency Correction for Multiple Images
Yinxuan Li, Li Li, Jian Yao, Menghan Xia, Hanyun Wang · IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing · 2022
Color consistency optimization for multiple images is a challenging task in remote sensing and computer vision. To ensure that the visual quality of corrected images is satisfactory, not only should the color discrepancies between multiple images be invisible, but also the contrast of individual images should be visually appealing. Most color correction approaches focus on eliminating drastic color discrepancies, but ignore the problem of image contrast enhancement. Some color correction approaches even tend to degrade the image contrast to ensure that the image tones are consistent especially when the contrast of input images is low. To solve this problem, we present a contrast-aware color consistency correction approach in this paper. We attempt to eliminate the drastic color differences and enhance the contrast of input images simultaneously. We creatively integrate the problems of color consistency correction and image contrast enhancement into the same global energy optimization framework, and we also design a special cost function to minimize the color discrepancies and enhance the image contrast using the original color information. Thus, although the contrast of input images is low, our approach can still generate the corrected images with consistent tones and visually appealing contrast. At last, we select several challenging datasets to evaluate our approach. The experimental results visually and quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed contrast-aware color consistency correction approach. The results also demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the existing approaches, especially when the contrast of the input images is low.