Autonomous Color Theme Extraction From Images Using Saliency

摘要

Color theme (palette) is a collection of color swatches for representing or describing colors in a visual design or an image. Color palettes have broad applications such as serving as means in automatic/semi-automatic design of visual media, as measures in quantifying aesthetics of visual design, and as metrics in image retrieval, image enhancement, and color semantics. In this paper, we suggest an autonomous mechanism for extracting color palettes from an image. Our method is simple and fast, and it works on the notion of visual saliency. By using visual saliency, we extract the fine colors appearing in the foreground along with the various colors in the background regions of an image. Our method accounts for defining different numbers of colors in the palette as well as presenting the proportion of each color according to its visual conspicuity in a given image. This flexibility supports an interactive color palette which may facilitate the designer's color design task. As an application, we present how our extracted color palettes can be utilized as a color similarity metric to enhance the current color semantic based image retrieval techniques.