Monge’s Unique Property of White Surfaces

As hypothesized by Gaspard Monge in the eighteenth century, white surfaces have a unique property that distinguishes them from other coloured specular surfaces. We test his hypothesis using modern digital imagery and find it to hold. We then incorporate it into an algorithm that identifies white surfaces when the illumination colour is unknown. Since white surfaces reflect the colour of the incident illumination, the method also has application to the problem of illumination estimation for colour constancy.