Culture-inspired Multi-modal Color Palette Generation and Colorization: A Chinese Youth Subculture Case

TL;DR

This paper introduces a culturally aware multi-modal framework for generating and applying Chinese Youth Subculture-inspired color palettes to images, emphasizing cultural significance in design.

Contribution

It constructs a unique CYS-inspired color dataset and develops an interactive generative system for culturally specific color palette creation and image colorization.

Findings

Colors in CYS have unique aesthetic and semantic features.

The framework effectively generates culturally relevant color palettes.

User studies validate the quality of generated colorizations.

Abstract

Color is an essential component of graphic design, acting not only as a visual factor but also carrying cultural implications. However, existing research on algorithmic color palette generation and colorization largely ignores the cultural aspect. In this paper, we contribute to this line of research by first constructing a unique color dataset inspired by a specific culture, i.e., Chinese Youth Subculture (CYS), which is an vibrant and trending cultural group especially for the Gen Z population. We show that the colors used in CYS have special aesthetic and semantic characteristics that are different from generic color theory. We then develop an interactive multi-modal generative framework to create CYS-styled color palettes, which can be used to put a CYS twist on images using our automatic colorization model. Our framework is illustrated via a demo system designed with the human-in-the-loop principle that constantly provides feedback to our algorithms. User studies are also conducted to evaluate our generation results.