• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.1-9
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• 2008

This paper presents a novel optimization-based saliency-preserving method for converting color images to grayscale in a manner consistent with conventional approaches of black-and-white photographers. In black-and-white photography, a colored filter called a contrast filter has been commonly employed on a camera to lighten or darken selected colors. In addition, local exposure controls such as dodging and burning techniques are typically employed in the darkroom process to change the exposure of local areas within the print without affecting the overall exposure. Our method seeks a digital version of a conventional contrast filter to preserve visually-important image features. Furthermore, conventional burning and dodging techniques are addressed, together with image similarity weights, to give edge-aware local exposure control over the image space. Our method can be efficiently optimized on GPU. According to the experiments, CUDA implementation enables 1 megapixel color images to be converted to grayscale at interactive frames rates.