Abstract: Image colorization is the process of adding color to a monochrome image or movie,which is an active but challenging research topic.Based on the observation that the tone map of an image gives the important visual appearance of the image,this paper proposes a novel approach for colorizing black-and-white cartoon images by preserving their tone properties.First,an edge preserving image decomposition method constructs a tone map which solves intensity discontinuity in a cartoon image.Also,a Gabor feature vector builds a pattern map in order to prevent boundary discontinuity.Finally,both the tone map and the pattern map are contributed to an optimization algorithm,obtaining a better color appearance for the cartoon image.Our method generates satisfactory colorization results given only a few user-specified color strokes without segmentation.Many experimental results have shown that our method obtains high quality colorization results for kinds of cartoon images including hatching cartoons,halftone cartoons,and caricature cartoons.