Color matching images with unknown non-linear encodings

We present a color matching method that, given two different views of the same scene taken by two cameras with unknown settings and unknown internal parameter values, and encoded with unknown non-linear curves, is able to correct the colors of one of the images making it look as if it was captured under the other camera’s settings. Our method is based on treating the in-camera color processing pipeline as a matrix multiplication followed by a non-linearity. This allows us to model a color stabilization transformation among the two shots by estimating several parameters. The method is fast and the results have no spurious colors. It outperforms the state-of-the-art both visually and according to several metrics, and can handle very challenging real-life examples. This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 761544 (project HDR4EU) and under grant agreement number 780470 (project SAUCE), and by the Spanish government and FEDER Fund, grant ref. TIN2015-71537-P (MINECO/FEDER,UE).