Abstract: Histogram equalization is a well-known method for image contrast enhancement.Nevertheless,as histograms do not include any information on the spatial repartition of colors,their application to local image editing problems remains limited.To cope with this lack of spatial information,spatiograms have been recently proposed for tracking purposes.A spatiogram is an image descriptor that combines a histogram with the mean and the variance of the position of each color.This paper addresses the problem of local retouching of images by proposing a variational method for spatiogram transfer.More precisely,a reference spatiogram is used to modify the color value of a given region of interest of the processed image.Experiments on shadow removal and inpainting demonstrate the strength of the proposed approach.