In this paper we present a method for the estimation of the color of the illuminant in RAW images. The method includes a Convolutional Neural Network that has been specially designed to produce multiple local estimates. A multiple illuminant detector determines whether or not the local outputs of the network must be aggregated into a single estimate. We evaluated our method on standard datasets with single and multiple illuminants, obtaining lower estimation errors with respect to those obtained by other general purpose methods in the state of the art.
This paper presents a negative result: current machine colour constancy algorithms are not good enough for colour-based object recognition. This result has surprised us since we have previously used the better of these algorithms successfully to correct the colour balance of images for display. Colour balancing has been the typical application of colour constancy, rarely has it been actually put to use in a computer vision system, so our goal was to show how well the various methods would do on an obvious machine colour vision task, namely, object recognition. Although all the colour constancy methods we tested proved insufficient for the task, we consider this an important finding in itself. In addition we present results showing the correlation between colour constancy performance and object recognition performance, and as one might expect, the better the colour constancy the better the recognition rate.