Image recoloring based on fast and flexible palette extraction

Many operations, such as color transfer, recoloring, and image decomposition, are involved in the color manipulation of image editing. This paper introduces a simple, intuitive and interactive tool that allows non-experts to recolor an image by editing a color palette. First, we introduce a network that extracts a color palette from an image. Then, we introduce a network that decomposes the image into weighted layers, each corresponding to a palette color. In addition, a method is proposed to generate a variable-size palette and corresponding weighted layers. Applications such as image recoloring can be performed based on the final palette combined with the weighted layers. Our experiments show that it is much faster than the state-of-the-art image recoloring methods while keeping a better visual effect. Our algorithm can extract the palette from a 256 × 256 image in 0.077 s with the smallest palette loss 0.052 and then recolor the image in 0.3 s average.