A fast white balance algorithm based on pixel greyness. Issue 3 (March 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Thai, Ba; Deng, Guang; Ross, Robert
• Is Part Of: Signal, image and video processing. Volume 11:Issue 3(2017)
• Page Start: 525
• Page End: 532
• Publication Date: 2017-03
• Subjects: Automatic white balance -- Illuminant estimation -- YCbCr colour space -- Greyness; Signal processing -- Digital techniques -- Periodicals; Image processing -- Digital techniques -- Periodicals; Digital video -- Periodicals; 621.3822
• DOI: 10.1007/s11760-016-0990-6
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1863-1703

Abstract

Abstract The goal of automatic white balance (AWB) is to maintain colour constancy of an image by removing colour cast caused by un-canonical illuminant. In this paper, we address two limitations associated with a class of AWB algorithms and propose a technique to estimate the illuminant which takes into consideration the internal illumination and all pixels of the image. The estimate is calculated by a weighted average of all pixels. The weight for a pixel is determined from the greyness. The greyness of a pixel is measured from its chroma Cb and Cr in the YCbCr colour space. The experimental results demonstrate that performance of the proposed technique is competitive with that of state-of-the-art AWB algorithms. The proposed algorithm can be implemented in real-time applications, such as in consumer digital cameras due to its low computational complexity.