Kobus Barnard, Graham Finlayson, and Brian Funt, "Colour constancy for
scenes with
varying illumination," 4th European Conference on Computer Vision,
Bernard Buxton and Roberto Cipolla, eds., Springer (1996)
The copyright for the above paper has been transfered to Springer-Verlag. As part of the agreement , Springer-Verlag kindly allows authors to have the text of the papers on their personal web pages and thus the text versions of the paper will remain after publication. The paper will be published in the appropriate Lecture Notes in Computing Science (LNCS)
We present an algorithm which uses information from both surface reflectance and illumination variation to solve for colour constancy. Most colour constancy algorithms assume that the illumination across a scene is constant, but this is very often not valid for real images. The method presented in this work identifies and removes the illumination variation, and in addition uses the variation to constrain the solution. The constraint is applied conjunctively to constraints found from surface reflectances. Thus the algorithm can provide good colour constancy when there is sufficient variation in surface reflectances, or sufficient illumination variation, or a combination of both. We present the results of running the algorithm on several real scenes, and the results are very encouraging.
Note: This paper is largely superseded by
this one.
Keywords: colour, colour constancy, varying illumination, Retinex, image segmentation
Full text (gzipped postscript)