Progressive Image Color Neutralization Based on Adaptive Histogram Clustering

Current digital devices lack the ability to adapt to various lighting conditions, and this makes image color auto adjustment increasingly important. In this paper, we present a simple and effective progressive image color neutralization approach to adjust the image bright region, dark region and mid region independently. First we neutralize the bright region and dark region based on single representative color alignment, then multiple representative colors of the mid region are selected by an adaptive histogram clustering algorithm, and the adjustment of the mid region is based on the alignment of multiple representative colors. The adjustment is done by simple piecewise linear mapping. Experiments show that our approach can not only remove unwanted color cast effectively, but also maintain the original color tone as much as possible.