Estimation of illuminant chromaticity from single color image using perceived illumination and highlight

This article proposes a method for calculating the illuminant chromaticity of an image by combining the Perceived Illumination and Highlight approache s. Object color can be determined by the characteristic of scene illuminant and surface. In this article, perceived illumination effect is extended an d with the highlight analysis, a hybrid approach is proposed to estimate th e illuminant chromaticity. The perceived illumination approach provides a s table candidate range for the estimation of illuminant chromaticity however , the accuracy is slightly degraded depending on the image contents. The hi ghlight approach does not depend on the image contents and provides an accu rate solution of the scene illuminant chromaticity, however, it is difficul t to determine the final solution among many cross-points. These two approa ches are in effect mutually compensating. The solution from perceived illum ination can be used as a starting point or as base information for the high light approach to get the final solution.