Neural Preset for Color Style Transfer

Abstract: In this paper, we present a Neural Preset technique to address the limitations of existing color style transfer methods, including visual artifacts, vast memory requirement, and slow style switching speed. Our method is based on two core designs. First, we propose Deterministic Neural Color Mapping (DNCM) to consistently operate on each pixel via an image-adaptive color mapping matrix, avoiding artifacts and supporting high-resolution inputs with a small memory footprint. Second, we develop a two-stage pipeline by dividing the task into color normalization and stylization, which allows efficient style switching by extracting color styles as presets and reusing them on normalized input images. Due to the unavailability of pairwise datasets, we describe how to train Neural Preset via a self-supervised strategy. Various advantages of Neural Preset over existing methods are demonstrated through comprehensive evaluations. Notably, Neural Preset enables stable 4K color style transfer in real-time without artifacts. Besides, we show that our trained model can naturally support multiple applications without fine-tuning, including low-light image enhancement, underwater image correction, image dehazing, and image harmonization. Project page with demos: https://zhkkke.github.io/NeuralPreset .