Optimizing color consistency in photo collections

Figure 1: Editing a photo collection with our method. First row: input images exhibiting inconsistent appearance. Red arrows indicate pairs of images that were detected to share content. Second row: automatically induced consistent appearance. Third row: after propagating user adjustment of the leftmost photo (photos with similar content are affected more strongly). Fourth row: propagation of an adjustment done to the sixth photo. Previous adjustment remains as constraint. (Note: adjustments are deliberately exaggerated in this example.) With dozens or even hundreds of photos in today’s digital photo albums, editing an entire album can be a daunting task. Existing automatic tools operate on individual photos without ensuring con-sistency of appearance between photographs that share content. In this paper, we present a new method for consistent editing of photo collections. Our method automatically enforces consistent appear-ance of images that share content without any user input. When the user does make changes to selected images, these changes au-tomatically propagate to other images in the collection, while still maintaining as much consistency as possible. This makes it pos-sible to interactively adjust an entire photo album in a consistent manner by manipulating only a few images. Our method operates by efficiently constructing a graph with edges linking photo pairs that share content. Consistent appearance of connected photos is achieved by globally optimizing a quadratic cost function over the entire graph, treating user-specified edits as constraints in the optimization. The optimization is fast enough to provide interactive visual feedback to the user. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach using a number of personal and profes-sional photo collections, as well as internet collections. Links: DL PDF WEB