A Color Constancy Model with Double-Opponency Mechanisms

Abstract

The double-opponent color-sensitive cells in the primary visual cortex (V1) of the human visual system (HVS) have long been recognized as the physiological basis of color constancy. We introduce a new color constancy model by imitating the functional properties of the HVS from the retina to the double-opponent cells in V1. The idea behind the model originates from the observation that the color distribution of the responses of double-opponent cells to the input color-biased images coincides well with the light source direction. Then the true illuminant color of a scene is easily estimated by searching for the maxima of the separate RGB channels of the responses of double-opponent cells in the RGB space. Our systematical experimental evaluations on two commonly used image datasets show that the proposed model can produce competitive results in comparison to the complex state-of-the-art approaches, but with a simple implementation and without the need for training.