Temporal Color Morphing

XueZhong Xiao, Lizhuang Ma

Abstract: Many natural phenomena usually appear in the scenes of movies. They are characterized by color changing smoothly following the time’s advancement, e.g. day breaking, leaves’ resurgence, foliage greening from yellow or yellowing from green. They are difficult to be captured wholly because of the long time span. Traditional methods for making these types of scenes are inefficient or makeshifts. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic temporal color morphing technique for the simulation of smooth color-changing phenomena. Our temporal color morphing method is based on histogram manipulation—histogram warping and histogram-based color transformation. For the simplicity of the calculation, we convert the input of the source sequence and target image to lα β color space. This way we split the three-dimensional problem to three one-dimensional problems. The coordinates are quantized in lα β space with a limited error condition. For customization of the results by the user, we introduce a timing mechanism for controlling the velocities of color morphing. Finally, we apply our temporal color morphing technique to the video clips of several representative natural phenomena to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.