An Illumination Insensitive and Structure-Aware Image Color Layer Decomposition Method

Wengang Cheng, Pengli Dou, Dengwen Zhou

Abstract: To decompose of an image into a set of color layers can facilitate many image editing manipulations, but the high-quality layering remains challenging. We propose a novel illumination insensitive and structure-aware layer decomposition approach. To reduce the influence of non-uniform illumination on color appearance, we design a scheme of letting the decomposition work on the reflectance image output by intrinsic decomposition, rather than the original image commonly used in previous work. To obtain fine layers, we leverage image specific structure information and enforce it by encoding a structure-aware prior into a novel energy minimization formulation. The proposed optimization considers the fidelity, our structure-aware prior and permissible ranges simultaneously. We provide a solver to this optimization to get final layers. Experiments demonstrate that our method can obtain finer layers compared to several state-of-the-art methods.