Colour balancing using sclera colour

Abstract

Colour balancing is an image processing step employed in image signal processing pipeline to adjust colouration of images captured under different illuminations. Most of the existing colour balancing methods that make use of human faces and facial features use skin colour to estimate the chromaticity of the illuminant. This study examines how colour balancing can be performed exploiting the sclera colour extracted from the face automatically detected in the image. Sclera colour can provide enough and correct information to estimate the scene illuminant and reliably perform automatic colour balancing for face images. Experimental results suggest that, in terms of accuracy, the proposed method outperforms most other colour constancy methods on the experimental dataset collected as part of this research, which is a significant result.