Estimating the color of the illuminant using anisotropic diffusion

Abstract

The human visual system is able to determine the color of objects irrespective of the power distribution illuminating the scene. This ability is called color constancy. It would be highly interesting to mimic this ability of the human visual system. Accurate color reproduction is very important from consumer photography to automatic color based object recognition. In theory, if we knew the color of the illuminant for each image pixel, we would be able to compute a color corrected image which is independent of the illuminant. We suggest the use of anisotropic diffusion to estimate the illuminant locally for each image pixel. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.