Illumination estimation based on valid pixel selection in highlight region

This paper proposes a method for estimating the illuminant chromaticity using the distributions of camera responses obtained by a CCD camera in a real-world scene. Illuminant estimation using a highlight method is based on the geometric relation between a body and its surface reflection. In general, the pixels in a highlight region are affected by an illuminant geometric difference, camera quantization errors and the nonuniformity of the CCD sensor. As such, this leads to inaccurate results if an illuminant is estimated using the pixels of a CCD camera without any preprocessing. Accordingly, to solve this problem, the proposed method analyzes the distribution of the CCD camera responses and selects pixels using the Mahalanobis distance in highlight regions. The use of the Mahalanobis distance based on the camera responses enables the adaptive selection of valid pixels among the pixels distributed in the highlight regions. Lines are then determined based on the selected pixels with r-g chromaticity coordinates using a principal component analysis (PCA). Thereafter, the illuminant chromaticity is estimated based on the intersection points of the lines. Experimental results using the proposed method demonstrated a reduced estimation error compared with the conventional method.