Experiments on the White Patch Retinex in RGB and CIELAB color spaces

Abstract

Color constancy is an important process in a number of vision tasks. Most devices for capturing images operate on the RGB color space and, usually, the processing of the images is in this space, although some processes have shown a better performance when a perceptual color space is used instead. In this paper, experiments on the White Patch Retinex, a color constancy algorithm commonly used, are performed in two color spaces, RGB and CIELAB, for comparison purposes. Experimental results using an imagery set are analyzed using a no-reference quality metric and outcomes are discussed. It has been found that the White Patch Retinex algorithm shows a better performance in RGB than in CIELAB, but when color adjustments are implemented in sequence, firstly in CIELAB and then in RGB, much better results are obtained.