Lightweight Optimal-Transport Harmonization on Edge Devices
To address the unnatural appearance of augmented reality (AR) scenes caused by color inconsistency between virtual objects and real-world backgrounds, this paper proposes a lightweight, real-time color harmonization method. Grounded in optimal transport theory, our approach employs a compact encoder to directly predict the Monge–Kantorovich transport map for pixel-level color transfer. Notably, this is the first work to adapt optimal transport to on-device AR color harmonization, enabling efficient inference on edge devices. Our key contributions are: (1) the first pixel-accurate, manually annotated dataset specifically designed for AR color harmonization, along with an open-source toolkit for data acquisition; and (2) state-of-the-art performance on real AR composite images—achieving superior visual quality while maintaining real-time efficiency, thus attaining an optimal trade-off between fidelity and computational cost.