Guided Facial Skin Color Correction

Abstract: This paper proposes an automatic image correction method for portrait photographs, which promotes consistency of facial skin color by suppressing skin color changes due to background colors. In portrait photographs, skin color is often distorted due to the lighting environment (e.g., light reflected from a colored background wall and over-exposure by a camera strobe), and if the photo is artificially combined with another background color, this color change is emphasized, resulting in an unnatural synthesized result. In our framework, after roughly extracting the face region and rectifying the skin color distribution in a color space, we perform color and brightness correction around the face in the original image to achieve a proper color balance of the facial image, which is not affected by luminance and background colors. Unlike conventional algorithms for color correction, our final result is attained by a color correction process with a guide image. In particular, our guided image filtering for the color correction does not require a perfectly-aligned guide image required in the original guide image filtering method proposed by He et al. Experimental results show that our method generates more natural results than conventional methods on not only headshot photographs but also natural scene photographs. We also show automatic yearbook style photo generation as an another application.