Single and multiple illuminant estimation using convex functions

Abstract

The lighting situation in which a picture was taken has an impact on its color. Illuminant estimation is crucial in computer vision because the colors of objects vary as illumination changes. For this reason, numerous methods for estimating the illuminant have been suggested. In this paper, we suggest a novel statistic-based method for estimating single and multiple illuminants using convex functions. In this respect, convex functions are used in the two subsequent steps of normalization and weight creation. After using weighted K-means to segment the picture, each segment’s associated illuminations are determined. The illumination map for the input image is estimated as a final stage. In this study, we also analyze the effect of convexity on color constancy algorithms and present proofs for the convexity of some statistic-based algorithms. Four different single and multi-illuminant datasets have been used to evaluate the proposed algorithm in terms of two evaluation metrics; recovery and reproduction angular error. We believe that the proposed method could be considered one of the statistical state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, it has competitive results when compared to most learning-based and deep-learning methods. Further advantages of the proposed algorithm include its simplicity of implementation and low execution time.