Color Constancy for Uniform and Non-uniform Illuminant Using Image Texture

Color constancy is the capability to observe the true color of a scene from its image regardless of the scene’s illuminant. It is a significant part of the digital image processing pipeline and is utilized when the true color of an object is required. Most existing color constancy methods assume a uniform illuminant across the whole scene of the image, which is not always the case. Hence, their performances are influenced by the presence of multiple light sources. This paper presents a color constancy adjustment technique that uses the texture of the image pixels to select pixels with sufficient color variation to be used for image color correction. The proposed technique applies a histogram-based algorithm to determine the appropriate number of segments to efficiently split the image into its key color variation areas. The K-means++ algorithm is then used to divide the input image into the pre-determined number of segments. The proposed algorithm identifies pixels with sufficient color variation in each segment using the entropies of the pixels, which represent the segment’s texture. Then, the algorithm calculates the initial color constancy adjustment factors for each segment by applying an existing statistics-based color constancy algorithm on the selected pixels. Finally, the proposed method computes color adjustment factors per pixel within the image by fusing the initial color adjustment factors of all segments, which are regulated by the Euclidian distances of each pixel from the centers of gravity of the segments. Experimental results on benchmark single- and multiple-illuminant image datasets show that the images that are obtained using the proposed algorithm have significantly higher subjective and very competitive objective qualities compared to those that are obtained with the state-of-the-art techniques.