We present a statistical color constancy method that relies on novel gray pixel detection and mean shift clustering. The method, called Mean Shifted Grey Pixel -- MSGP, is based on the observation: true-gray pixels are aligned towards one single direction. Our solution is compact, easy to compute and requires no training. Experiments on two real-world benchmarks show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the camera-agnostic scenario. In the setting where the camera is known, MSGP outperforms all statistical methods.
@cite_14 @cite_37 @cite_21 estimate illumination from the understanding of the physical process of image formation ( the Dichromatic Model), thus being able to model highlights and inter-reflections. Most physics-based methods estimate illumination based on intersection of multiple dichromatic lines, making them work well on toy images and images with only a few surfaces but not very reliable on natural images @cite_21 . The latest physics-based method is @cite_28 , which relies on the longest dichromatic line segment assuming Phong reflection model holds and an ambient light exists. Although our method is based on the Dichromatic Model, we classify our approach as since the core of the method is finding gray pixels based on some observed image statistics. We refer readers to @cite_12 for more details about physics-based methods.
@cite_37 @cite_14 @cite_28 @cite_21 @cite_12
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We present a physics-based illumination estimation approach explicitly designed to handle natural images under ambient light. Existing physics-based color constancy methods are theoretically perfect but do not handle real-world images well because the majority of these methods assume a single illuminant. Therefore, specular pixels selected using existing methods produce estimated dichromatic lines that are thick or curvilinear in the presence of ambient light, thus generating significant errors. Based on the Phong reflection model, we show that a group of specular pixels on a uniformly colored object, although they are subject to intensity thresholding, produce a unique dichromatic line length depending on the geometry of each image path. Assuming that the longest dichromatic line is the most desirable when estimating the chromaticity of an illuminant, ambient-robust specular pixels are also found on the same path on which the longest dichromatic line segment is generated. Therefore, we propose a method to find the optimal image path in which the specular pixels produce the longest dichromatic line. Even though the number of collected specular pixels is reduced using the proposed method, they are proven to be more accurate when determining the illuminant chromaticity even in the existing methods. Experiments with an established benchmark data set and a self-produced image set find that the proposed method is better able to locate the illuminant chromaticity compared with the state-of-the-art color constancy methods. Statistics-based colour constancy algorithms work well as long as there are many colours in a scene, they fail however when the encountering scenes comprise few surfaces. In contrast, physics-based algorithms, based on an understanding of physical processes such as highlights and interreflections, are theoretically able to solve for colour constancy even when there are as few as two surfaces in a scene. Unfortunately, physics-based theories rarely work outside the lab. In this paper we show that a combination of physical and statistical knowledge leads to a surprisingly simple and powerful colour constancy algorithm, one that also works well for images of natural scenes. From a physical standpoint we observe that given the dichromatic model of image formation the colour signals coming from a single uniformly-coloured surface are mapped to a line in chromaticity space. One component of the line is defined by the colour of the illuminant (i.e. specular highlights) and the other is due to its matte, or Lambertian, reflectance. We then make the statistical observation that the chromaticities of common light sources all follow closely the Planckian locus of black-body radiators. It follows that by intersecting the dichromatic line with the Planckian locus we can estimate the chromaticity of the illumination. We can solve for colour constancy even when there is a single surface in the scene. When there are many surfaces in a scene the individual estimates from each surface are averaged together to improve accuracy. In a set of experiments on real images we show our approach delivers very good colour constancy. Moreover, performance is significantly better than previous dichromatic algorithms. In this paper, we present a method that estimates reflectance and illumination information from a single image depicting a single-material specular object from a given class under natural illumination. We follow a data-driven, learning-based approach trained on a very large dataset, but in contrast to earlier work we do not assume one or more components (shape, reflectance, or illumination) to be known. We propose a two-step approach, where we first estimate the object’s reflectance map, and then further decompose it into reflectance and illumination. For the first step, we introduce a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that directly predicts a reflectance map from the input image itself, as well as an indirect scheme that uses additional supervision, first estimating surface orientation and afterwards inferring the reflectance map using a learning-based sparse data interpolation technique. For the second step, we suggest a CNN architecture to reconstruct both Phong reflectance parameters and high-resolution spherical illumination maps from the reflectance map. We also propose new datasets to train these CNNs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for both steps by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation in both synthetic and real data as well as through numerous applications, that show improvements over the state-of-the-art. The dichromatic reflectance model introduced by S. Shafer (1985) predicts that the colour signals of most materials fall on a plane spanned by a vector due to the material and a vector that represents the scene illuminant. Since the illuminant is in the span of all dichromatic planes, colour constancy can be achieved by finding the intersection of two or more planes. Unfortunately, this approach has proven to be hard to get to work in practice. First, segmentation needs to be carried out and second, the actual intersection computation is quite unstable: small changes in the orientation of a dichromatic plane can significantly alter the location of the intersection point. We propose to ameliorate the instability problem by regularising the intersection. Specifically, we introduce a constraint on the colour of the illuminant. We show how the intersection problem in the context of convex and non-convex illuminant constraints, based on the distribution of common light sources, can be solved. This algorithm coupled with the simplest of segmentations results in good estimation results for a large set of real images. Estimation performance is significantly better than for the unconstrained algorithm.