Color Constancy Using the Inter-Reflection from a Reference Nose

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel camera attachment for measuring the illumination color spatially in the scene. The illumination color is then used to transform color appearance in the image into that under white light. The main idea is that the scene inter-reflection through a reference camera-attached surface “Nose” can, under some conditions, represent the illumination color directly. The illumination measurement principle relies on the satisfaction of the gray world assumption in a local scene area or the appearance of highlights, from dielectric surfaces. Scene inter-reflections are strongly blurred due to optical dispersion on the nose surface and defocusing of the nose surface image. Blurring smoothes the intense highlights and it thus becomes possible to measure the nose inter-reflection under conditions in which intensity variation in the main image would exceed the sensor dynamic range. We designed a nose surface to reflect a blurred scene version into a small image section, which is interpreted as a spatial illumination image. The nose image is then mapped to the main image for adjusting every pixel color. Experimental results showed that the nose inter-reflection color is a good measure of illumination color when the model assumptions are satisfied. The nose method performance, operating on real images, is presented and compared with the Retinex and the scene-inserted white patch methods.