Application and Evaluation of Colour Constancy in Visual Surveillance

The problem of colour constancy in the context of visual surveillance applications is addressed in this paper. We seek to reduce the variability of the surface colours inherent in the video of most indoor and outdoor surveillance scenarios to improve the robustness and reliability of applications which depend on reliable colour descriptions e.g. content retrieval. Two well-known colour constancy algorithms - the Grey-world and Gamut-mapping - are applied to frame sequences containing significant variations in the colour temperature of the illuminant. We also consider the problem of automatically selecting a reference image, representative of the scene under the canonical illuminant. A quantitative evaluation of the performance of the colour constancy algorithms is undertaken