A combined physical and statistical approach to colour constancy

Computational colour constancy tries to recover the colour of the scene illuminant of an image. Colour constancy algorithms can, in general, be divided into two groups: statistics-based approaches that exploit statistical knowledge of common lights and surfaces, and physics-based algorithms which are based on an understanding of how physical processes such as highlights manifest themselves in images. A combined physical and statistical colour constancy algorithm that integrates the advantages of the statistics-based colour by correlation method with those of a physics-based technique based on the dichromatic reflectance model is introduced. In contrast to other approaches not only a single illuminant estimate is provided but a set of likelihoods for a given illumination set. Experimental results on the benchmark Simon Fraser image database show the combined method to clearly outperform purely statistical and purely physical algorithms.