COLOR CONSTANCY FOR SCENES WITH VARYING ILLUMINATION

We present an algorithm which uses information from both surface refle ctance and illumination variation to solve for color constancy. Most c olor constancy algorithms assume that the illumination across a scene is constant, but this is very often not valid for real images. The met hod presented in this work identifies and removes the illumination var iation, and in addition uses the variation to constrain the solution. The constraint is applied conjunctively to constraints found from surf ace reflectances. Thus the algorithm can provide good color constancy when there is sufficient variation in surface reflectances, or suffici ent illumination variation, or a combination of both. We present the r esults of running the algorithm on several real scenes, and the result s are very encouraging. (C) 1997 Academic Press.