Edge-Based Color Constancy J. van de Weijer, T. Gevers, A. Gijsenij In IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2007. [bibtex] [pdf] [url]

Color constancy is the ability to measure colors of objects independent of the color of the light source. A well-known color constancy method is based on the Grey-World assumption which assumes that the average reflectance of surfaces in the world is achromatic. In this article, we propose a new hypothesis for color constancy namely the Grey-Edge hypothesis, which assumes that the average edge difference in a scene is achromatic. Based on this hypothesis, we propose an algorithm for color constancy. Contrary to existing color constancy algorithms, which are computed from the zero-order structure of images, our method is based on the derivative structure of images. Furthermore, we propose a framework which unifies a variety of known (Grey-World, max-RGB, Minkowski norm) and the newly proposed Grey-Edge and higher-order Grey-Edge algorithms. The quality of the various instantiations of the framework is tested and compared to the state-of-the-art color constancy methods on two large data sets of images recording objects under a large number of different light sources. The experiments show that the proposed color constancy algorithms obtain comparable results as the state-of-the-art color constancy methods with the merit of being computationally more efficient.



Source-code of the proposed framework can be found here or here
www.colorconstancy.com

@Article{vandeWeijerTIP2007,
  author       = "van de Weijer, J. and Gevers, T. and Gijsenij, A.",
  title        = "Edge-Based Color Constancy ",
  journal      = "IEEE Transactions on Image Processing",
  number       = "9",
  volume       = "16",
  pages        = "2207--2214",
  year         = "2007",
  url          = "https://ivi.fnwi.uva.nl/isis/publications/2007/vandeWeijerTIP2007",
  pdf          = "https://ivi.fnwi.uva.nl/isis/publications/2007/vandeWeijerTIP2007/vandeWeijerTIP2007.pdf",
  has_image    = 1
}