Patch based Colour Transfer using SIFT Flow

Abstract: We propose a new colour transfer method with Optimal Transport (OT) to transfer the colour of a sourceimage to match the colour of a target image of the same scene that may exhibit large motion changes betweenimages. By definition OT does not take into account any available information about correspondences whencomputing the optimal solution. To tackle this problem we propose to encode overlapping neighborhoodsof pixels using both their colour and spatial correspondences estimated using motion estimation. We solvethe high dimensional problem in 1D space using an iterative projection approach. We further introducesmoothing as part of the iterative algorithms for solving optimal transport namely Iterative DistributionTransport (IDT) and its variant the Sliced Wasserstein Distance (SWD). Experiments show quantitative andqualitative improvements over previous state of the art colour transfer methods.