Color by Correlation: A Simple, Unifying Approach to Color Constancy

  • Authors:
  • G. D. Finlayson;S. D. Hordley;P. M. Hubel

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICCV '99 Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision-Volume 2 - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

In this paper we consider the problem of color constancy; how given an image of a scene under an unknown illuminant can we recover an estimate of that light? Rather than recovering a single estimate of the illuminant as many previous authors have done, in the first instance we recover a measure of the likelihood that each possible illuminant was the scene illuminant. We do this by correlating image colors with the colors that can occur under each of a set of possible lights. We then recover an estimate of the scene illuminant based on these likelihoods. Computation is expressed and performed in a generic correlation framework which we develop in this paper. We develop a new probabilistic instantiation of this framework which delivers very good color constancy on synthetic and real images. We show that the proposed framework is rich enough to allow many existing algorithms to be expressed within it; e.g. the grey-world and gamut mapping algorithms. We explore too the relationship of these algorithms to other probabilistic and neural network approaches.