Shiming LAI^*, Xin TAN, Yu LIU, Bin WANG, and Maojun ZHANG

College of Information System and Management, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan 410073, China

(Received March 20, 2013; Accepted April 30, 2013)

Color constancy is a fundamental research topic in color and vision. Numerous methods have been proposed in recent years. New methods are highly accurate but tend to be more complex. This paper proposes a simple low-level statistical algorithm based on a new hypothesis, the grey block-differencing hypothesis, which states that the average of reflectance differences of adjacent blocks in a scene is achromatic. The new method has almost the same complexity as the simplest methods (i.e., grey world and max-RGB). Experimental results demonstrate that the accuracy of the proposed method is exceptional.

Key words: color constancy, grey block-differencing hypothesis, illuminant estimation, white balance

^*E-mail address: shiming413@gmail.com