Estimation of illuminant chromaticity from single color image using Perceived Illumination and Highlight

This article proposes a method for calculating the illuminant chromaticity of an image by combining the Perceived Illumination and Highlight approaches. Object color can be determined by the characteristic of scene illuminant and surface. In this article, perceived illumination effect is extended and with the highlight analysis, a hybrid approach is proposed to estimate the illuminant chromaticity. The perceived illumination approach provides a stable candidate range for the estimation of illuminant chromaticity however, the accuracy is slightly degraded depending on the image contents. The highlight approach does not depend on the image contents and provides an accurate solution of the scene illuminant chromaticity, however, it is difficult to determine the final solution among many cross-points. These two approaches are in effect mutually compensating. The solution from perceived illumination can be used as a starting point or as base information for the highlight approach to get the final solution.