Investigating the Position of Color in the Urban Townscape (Case Study: Mashhad, Imam Reza Street)

Nowadays, we observe our cities turbulent and unorganized in respect to color. Inconsistent locating of the buildings along with each other, the use of inhomogeneous colors, and the lack of attention to the psychological properties of colors have created the spaces in cities that are not compatible with the spirit of human and we do not feel relaxation in them any longer. This article is an attempt to express the importance of color theme and how to handle and use it in the city. Imam Reza Street has taken a kind of visual contamination in urban townscape due to the lack of appropriate color harmony. Color inconsistency and heterogeneity in the street walls of this street has created turmoil in the urban townscape; by using appropriate color in the street townscape it can be made a coordinated and rhythmic view, and a general unity and solidarity can be created in the city and make a favorable, appropriate, and more lively townscape of the city. The research method in this article is descriptive-analytical and data collection is in the form of a library-field method. To select a field, a part of Imam Reza Street (between 15th Khordad Square to Basij Square) was selected and extracting colored layers of street was performed through the RGB system by the aid of Photoshop software; then by using the Kil Hong’s Matrix, the elements composing the color in the street were analyzed, and the criteria and solutions were presented for planning in respect of the correct use of color in the urban townscape; finally, some plans were locally performed on several samples of the images taken from the street to illustrate the desired plan.

Attention-aware color theme extraction for fabric images

Color configuration plays an important role in art, design, and communication, which can influence the user’s experiences, feelings, and psychological well-being. It is laborious to manually select a color theme from scratch for handling large batches of images. Alternatively, it can inspire designers’ creations and save their time as well by leveraging the color themes in existing art works (e.g. fabric, paintings). However, it is challenging to automatically extract perceptually plausible color themes from fabric images. This paper presents a new automatic framework for extracting color themes from fabric images. A saliency map is built to help recognize the visual attention regions of the input image. Since the saliency map separates the image into visual attention regions (foreground) and non-visual attention regions (background), we respectively compute the dominant colors of these two regions, and merge them to form the initial target color theme based on certain rules. The dominant colors are extracted, accounting for the characteristics of the fabric and hue distributions of fabric images so as to acquire visually plausible results. Our method can be used to transfer colors between two fabric images for fabric color design. We tested our method thoroughly with various fabric images (e.g. cotton, silk, and linen) with different texture patterns (e.g. plain and twill). Experiments show that our method is more efficient and can generate more visually plausible results than state-of-the-art algorithms.

Artistic Coloring: Color Transfer from Painting

Color transfer is to alter an image’s color composition by reference to the color characteristics of another image. In this paper, we build a system called artistic coloring that realizes automatic color transfer from famous paintings. It properly extracts the wonderful color characteristics of famous paintings and applies them to color transfer. Specially, we investigate the traditional color theme extraction methods and find their deficiencies. Based on this, we quantify the processing of human painting to find the main colors in the color palette and propose an artistic balanced color theme extraction algorithm aimed specially at paintings. In the experiments, a user study is carried out to evaluate the artistic balanced extraction method. Our proposed method achieves the highest score 3.98 in a 5-point evaluation, which is 41% higher than traditional methods at most. We have successfully tested the artistic coloring system on lots of images with different painting styles. The results are natural and have the similar color characteristics with their corresponding reference paintings.