Learning Image Harmonization in the Linear Color Space

Harmonizing cut-and-paste images into perceptually realistic ones is challenging, as it requires a full understanding of the discrepancies between the background of the target image and the inserted object. Existing methods mainly adjust the appearances of the inserted object via pixel-level manipulations. They are not effective in correcting color discrepancy caused by different scene illuminations and the image formation processes. We note that image colors are essentially camera ISP projection of the scene radiance. If we can trace the image colors back to the radiance field, we may be able to model the scene illumination and harmonize the discrepancy better. In this paper, we propose a novel neural approach to harmonize the image colors in a camera-independent color space, in which color values are proportional to the scene radiance. To this end, we propose a novel image unprocessing module to estimate an intermediate high dynamic range version of the object to be inserted. We then propose a novel color harmonization module that harmonizes the colors of the inserted object by querying the estimated scene radiance and re-rendering the harmonized object in the output color space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. © 2023 IEEE.