Relaxed grey-world: Computational colour constancy by surface matching

Abstract

In this paper we present a new approach to computational colour constancy problem based on the process of surface matching. Classical colour constancy methods do not usually rely on this important source of information and they often use only partial information in the images. Our proposal is to introduce the use of a set of canonical surfaces and its matching versus the content of the image using a 'relaxed' grey-world assumption to perform colour constancy. Therefore, our approach takes into account information not considered in previous methods, which normally rely on statistical information in the image like highest luminance or image gamuts. Nevertheless the selection of the canonical surfaces is not a trivial process and should be studied deeply. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.