The assumption of a uniform light color distribution is no longer applicable in scenes that have multiple light colors. Most color constancy methods are designed to deal with a single light color, and thus are erroneous when applied to multiple light colors. The spatial variability in multiple light colors causes the color constancy problem to be more challenging and requires the extraction of local surface/light information. Motivated by this, we introduce a multi-task learning method to discount multiple light colors in a single input image. To have better cues of the local surface/light colors under multiple light color conditions, we design a novel multi-task learning framework. Our framework includes auxiliary tasks of achromatic-pixel detection and surface-color similarity prediction, providing better cues for local light and surface colors, respectively. Moreover, to ensure that our model maintains the constancy of surface colors regardless of the variations of light colors, a novel local surface color feature preservation scheme is developed. We demonstrate that our model achieves 47.1% improvement (from 4.69 mean angular error to 2.48) compared to a state-of-the-art multi-illuminant color constancy method on a multi-illuminant dataset (LSMI).
The Norwegian Colour and Visual Computing Laboratory, NTNU（挪威色彩与视觉计算实验室，挪威科技大学）
Non-uniform and multi-illuminant color constancy are important tasks, the solution of which will allow to discard information about lighting conditions in the image. Non-uniform illumination and shadows distort colors of real-world objects and mostly do not contain valuable information. Thus, many computer vision and image processing techniques would benefit from automatic discarding of this information at the pre-processing step. In this work we propose novel view on this classical problem via generative end-to-end algorithm based on image conditioned Generative Adversarial Network. We also d…
In this paper, we present CLCC, a novel contrastive learning framework for color constancy. Contrastive learning has been applied for learning high-quality visual representations for image classification. One key aspect to yield useful representations for image classification is to design illuminant invariant augmentations. However, the illuminant invariant assumption conflicts with the nature of the color constancy task, which aims to estimate the illuminant given a raw image. Therefore, we construct effective contrastive pairs for learning better illuminant-dependent features via a novel raw…
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Noak’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司诺亚方舟实验室）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Color constancy aims to restore the constant colors of a scene under different illuminants. However, due to the existence of camera spectral sensitivity, the network trained on a certain sensor, cannot work well on others. Also, since the training datasets are collected in certain environments, the diversity of illuminants is limited for complex real world prediction. In this paper, we tackle these problems via two aspects. First, we propose cross-sensor self-supervised training to train the network. In detail, we consider both the general sRGB images and the white-balanced RAW images from cur…
We present Fast Fourier Color Constancy (FFCC), a color constancy algorithm which solves illuminant estimation by reducing it to a spatial localization task on a torus. By operating in the frequency domain, FFCC produces lower error rates than the previous state-of-the-art by 13-20% while being 250-3000 times faster. This unconventional approach introduces challenges regarding aliasing, directional statistics, and preconditioning, which we address. By producing a complete posterior distribution over illuminants instead of a single illuminant estimate, FFCC enables better training techniques, a…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究院）
Color constancy is the recovery of true surface color from observed color, and requires estimating the chromaticity of scene illumination to correct for the bias it induces. In this paper, we show that the per-pixel color statistics of natural scenes---without any spatial or semantic context---can by themselves be a powerful cue for color constancy. Specifically, we describe an illuminant estimation method that is built around a "classifier" for identifying the true chromaticity of a pixel given its luminance (absolute brightness across color channels). During inference, each pixel's observed …
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Northeastern State University（东北州立大学）；Nokia-Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）
As a novel method eliminating chromatic aberration on objects, computational color constancy has becoming a fundamental prerequisite for many computer vision applications. Among algorithms performing this task, the learning-based ones have achieved great success in recent years. However, they fail to fully consider the spatial information of images, leaving plenty of room for improvement of the accuracy of illuminant estimation. In this paper, by exploiting the spatial information of images, we propose a color constancy algorithm called Attention Dense Color Constancy (ADCC) using convolutiona…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Information about the illuminant color is well contained in both achromatic regions and the specular components of highlight regions. In this paper, we propose a novel way to achieve color constancy by exploiting such clues. The key to our approach lies in the use of suitably extracted derivative colors, which are able to compute the illuminant color robustly with kernel density estimation. While extracting derivative colors from achromatic regions to approximate the illuminant color well is basically straightforward, the success of our extraction in highlight regions is attributed to the diff…
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Mila（米拉）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Contemporary approaches frame the color constancy problem as learning camera specific illuminant mappings. While high accuracy can be achieved on camera specific data, these models depend on camera spectral sensitivity and typically exhibit poor generalisation to new devices. Additionally, regression methods produce point estimates that do not explicitly account for potential ambiguities among plausible illuminant solutions, due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. We propose a Bayesian framework that naturally handles color constancy ambiguity via a multi-hypothesis strategy. Firstly, we s…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
It is an ill-posed problem to recover the true scene colors from a color biased image by discounting the effects of scene illuminant and camera spectral sensitivity (CSS) at the same time. Most color constancy (CC) models have been designed to first estimate the illuminant color, which is then removed from the color biased image to obtain an image taken under white light, without the explicit consideration of CSS effect on CC. This paper first studies the CSS effect on illuminant estimation arising in the inter-dataset-based CC (inter-CC), i.e., training a CC model on one dataset and then test…
In this paper we present a deep learning method to estimate the illuminant of an image. Our model is not trained with illuminant annotations, but with the objective of improving performance on an auxiliary task such as object recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of a deep learning architecture for illuminant estimation that is trained without ground truth illuminants. We evaluate our solution on standard datasets for color constancy, and compare it with state of the art methods. Our proposal is shown to outperform most deep learning methods in a cross-dataset ev…
Computational color constancy refers to the problem of computing the illuminant color so that the images of a scene under varying illumination can be normalized to an image under the canonical illumination. In this paper, we adopt a deep learning framework for the illumination estimation problem. The proposed method works under the assumption of uniform illumination over the scene and aims for the accurate illuminant color computation. Specifically, we trained the convolutional neural network to solve the problem by casting the color constancy problem as an illumination classification problem.…
Primary visual cortex contributes to color constancy by predicting rather than discounting the illuminant: evidence from a computational study
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）；School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学生命科学与技术学院）
Boosting Illuminant Estimation in Deep Color Constancy through Enhancing Brightness Robustness
School of Computer Science and Cyber Engineering, Guangzhou University（广州大学计算机科学与网络工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University（浙江大学区块链与数据安全国家重点实验室）；Information Security Research Group, University College London（伦敦大学学院信息安全研究组）
Reliable estimation of illuminant chromaticity is crucial for simulating color constancy and for white balancing digital images. However, estimating illuminant chromaticity from a single image is an ill-posed task, in general, and existing solutions typically employ a variety of assumptions and heuristics. In this paper, we present a new, physically-based, approach for estimating illuminant chromaticity from interreflections of light between diffuse surfaces. Our approach assumes that all of the direct illumination in the scene has the same chromaticity, and that at least two areas where inter…
In this study, a novel illuminant color estimation framework is proposed for computational color constancy, which incorporates the high representational capacity of deep-learning-based models and the great interpretability of assumption-based models. The well-designed building block, feature map reweight unit (ReWU), helps to achieve comparative accuracy on benchmark datasets with respect to prior state-of-the-art deep learning based models while requiring more compact model size and cheaper computational cost. In addition to local color estimation, a confidence estimation branch is also inclu…
The goal of computational color constancy is to preserve the perceptive colors of objects under different lighting conditions by removing the effect of color casts caused by the scene's illumination. With the rapid development of deep learning based techniques, significant progress has been made in image semantic segmentation. In this work, we exploit the semantic information together with the color and spatial information of the input image in order to remove color casts. We train a convolutional neural network (CNN) model that learns to estimate the illuminant color and gamma correction para…
University of Milan-Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）；University of Pavia（帕维亚大学）
In this work we describe a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to accurately predict the scene illumination. Taking image patches as input, the CNN works in the spatial domain without using hand-crafted features that are employed by most previous methods. The network consists of one convolutional layer with max pooling, one fully connected layer and three output nodes. Within the network structure, feature learning and regression are integrated into one optimization process, which leads to a more effective model for estimating scene illumination. This approach achieves state-of-the-art performa…
Tampere University of Technology（坦佩雷理工大学）；Intel Finland（英特尔芬兰公司）；Czech Technical University（捷克理工大学）
Computational color constancy that requires esti- mation of illuminant colors of images is a fundamental yet active problem in computer vision, which can be formulated into a regression problem. To learn a robust regressor for color constancy, obtaining meaningful imagery features and capturing latent correlations across output variables play a vital role. In this work, we introduce a novel deep structured-output regression learning framework to achieve both goals simultaneously. By borrowing the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) originally designed for visual recognition, the …
In this paper, a learning-free color constancy algorithm called the Patch-wise Bright Pixels (PBP) is proposed. In this algorithm, an input image is first downsampled and then cut equally into a few patches. After that, according to the modified brightness of each patch, a proper fraction of brightest pixels in the patch is selected. Finally, Gray World (GW)-based methods are applied to the selected bright pixels to estimate the illuminant of the scene. Experiments on NUS $8$-Camera Dataset show that the PBP algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art learning-free methods as well as a broad ra…
Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；University of East Anglia（东英吉利大学）
The aim of colour constancy is to discount the effect of the scene illumination from the image colours and restore the colours of the objects as captured under a 'white' illuminant. For the majority of colour constancy methods, the first step is to estimate the scene illuminant colour. Generally, it is assumed that the illumination is uniform in the scene. However, real world scenes have multiple illuminants, like sunlight and spot lights all together in one scene. We present in this paper a simple yet very effective framework using a deep CNN-based method to estimate and use multiple illumina…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Regressing the illumination of a scene from the representations of object appearances is popularly adopted in computational color constancy. However, it's still challenging due to intrinsic appearance and label ambiguities caused by unknown illuminants, diverse reflection property of materials and extrinsic imaging factors (such as different camera sensors). In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm by Cascading Convolutional Color Constancy (in short, C4) to improve robustness of regression learning and achieve stable generalization capability across datasets (different cameras and scenes…
INESC TEC；Tecnalia（特克纳利亚）；Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto（波尔图大学工程学院）
Dermoscopic skin images are often obtained with different imaging devices, under varying acquisition conditions. In this work, instead of attempting to perform intensity and color normalization, we propose to leverage computational color constancy techniques to build an artificial data augmentation technique suitable for this kind of images. Specifically, we apply the \emph{shades of gray} color constancy technique to color-normalize the entire training set of images, while retaining the estimated illuminants. We then draw one sample from the distribution of training set illuminants and apply …
We present "Cross-Camera Convolutional Color Constancy" (C5), a learning-based method, trained on images from multiple cameras, that accurately estimates a scene's illuminant color from raw images captured by a new camera previously unseen during training. C5 is a hypernetwork-like extension of the convolutional color constancy (CCC) approach: C5 learns to generate the weights of a CCC model that is then evaluated on the input image, with the CCC weights dynamically adapted to different input content. Unlike prior cross-camera color constancy models, which are usually designed to be agnostic t…
Bio-inspired Color Constancy: From Gray Anchoring Theory to Gray Pixel Methods
MOE Key Laboratory for Neuroinformation, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（教育部神经信息学重点实验室，生命科学与技术学院，电子科学与技术大学）；School of Electronic Engineering and Automation, Guilin University of Electronic Technology（电子工程与自动化学院，桂林电子科技大学）
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Computational color constancy refers to the estimation of the scene illumination and makes the perceived color relatively stable under varying illumination. In the past few years, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have delivered superior performance in illuminant estimation. Several representative methods formulate it as a multi-label prediction problem by learning the local appearance of image patches using CNNs. However, these approaches inevitably make incorrect estimations for the ambiguous patches affected by their neighborhood contexts. Inaccurate local estimates are likely to br…
Digital camera pipelines employ color constancy methods to estimate an unknown scene illuminant, in order to re-illuminate images as if they were acquired under an achromatic light source. Fully-supervised learning approaches exhibit state-of-the-art estimation accuracy with camera-specific labelled training imagery. Resulting models typically suffer from domain gaps and fail to generalise across imaging devices. In this work, we propose a new approach that affords fast adaptation to previously unseen cameras, and robustness to changes in capture device by leveraging annotated samples across d…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Huawei（华为）
Computational Colour Constancy (CCC) consists of estimating the colour of one or more illuminants in a scene and using them to remove unwanted chromatic distortions. Much research has focused on illuminant estimation for CCC on single images, with few attempts of leveraging the temporal information intrinsic in sequences of correlated images (e.g., the frames in a video), a task known as Temporal Colour Constancy (TCC). The state-of-the-art for TCC is TCCNet, a deep-learning architecture that uses a ConvLSTM for aggregating the encodings produced by CNN submodules for each image in a sequence.…
Institute for Information Transmission Problems, RAS（俄罗斯科学院信息传输问题研究所）；University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学）
Computational color constancy has the important task of reducing the influence of the scene illumination on the object colors. As such, it is an essential part of the image processing pipelines of most digital cameras. One of the important parts of the computational color constancy is illumination estimation, i.e. estimating the illumination color. When an illumination estimation method is proposed, its accuracy is usually reported by providing the values of error metrics obtained on the images of publicly available datasets. However, over time it has been shown that many of these datasets hav…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Tokai University（东海大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel template matching method with a white balancing adjustment, called N-white balancing, which was proposed for multi-illuminant scenes. To reduce the influence of lighting effects, N-white balancing is applied to images for multi-illumination color constancy, and then a template matching method is carried out by using adjusted images. In experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated to be effective in object detection tasks under various illumination conditions.
Institute for Information Transmission Problems, RAS（俄罗斯科学院信息传输问题研究所）；National Research University The Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）；Gideon Brothers（吉迪恩兄弟公司）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Image Processing Systems Institute of RAS（俄罗斯科学院图像处理系统研究所）；Huawei MultiMedia Team（华为多媒体团队）；University of Milano – Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）
Illumination estimation is the essential step of computational color constancy, one of the core parts of various image processing pipelines of modern digital cameras. Having an accurate and reliable illumination estimation is important for reducing the illumination influence on the image colors. To motivate the generation of new ideas and the development of new algorithms in this field, the 2nd Illumination estimation challenge~(IEC\#2) was conducted. The main advantage of testing a method on a challenge over testing in on some of the known datasets is the fact that the ground-truth illuminati…
Institute for Information Transmission Problems (Kharkevich Institute) of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院信息传输问题研究所（哈尔凯维奇研究所））；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (State University)（莫斯科物理技术学院（国立大学））
We present a collection of 24 multiple object scenes each recorded under 18 multiple light source illumination scenarios. The illuminants are varying in dominant spectral colours, intensity and distance from the scene. We mainly address the realistic scenarios for evaluation of computational colour constancy algorithms, but also have aimed to make the data as general as possible for computational colour science and computer vision. Along with the images of the scenes, we provide spectral characteristics of the camera, light sources and the objects and include pixel-by-pixel ground truth annota…
