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Efficient decolorization preserving dominant distinctions

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Abstract

Representing color images in grayscale has practical and theoretical importance. Current color-to-gray transformations seldom ensure both quality and efficiency simultaneously in practice. In this paper, we present an efficient global mapping from color to gray while preserving visually dominant features of color images. Our color-to-gray transformation is based on a variant of traditional Difference of Gaussians band-pass filter, which is called luminance filter. The band-pass filter usually has high responses on regions with discriminative colors from their surroundings for certain band. The grayscale is derived from the luminance passing a series of band-pass filters. Our method is linear in the number of pixels, simple to implement and computationally efficient, making it suitable for high resolution images. Experimental results show that our method produces convincing results for a large number of natural and synthetic images.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61202278, 61272032) and Research Grants Council of Hong Kong SAR (CityU 118512), City University of Hong Kong (SRG 7004072).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China

    Zhongping Ji, Mei-e Fang & Yigang Wang

  2. Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Weiyin Ma

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  1. Zhongping Ji
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  2. Mei-e Fang
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  3. Yigang Wang
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Correspondence to Zhongping Ji.

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Ji, Z., Fang, Me., Wang, Y. et al. Efficient decolorization preserving dominant distinctions. Vis Comput 32, 1621–1631 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-015-1145-4

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