Design of a Customized Pattern for Improving Color Constancy Across Camera and Illumination Changes

This paper adresses the problem of color constancy on a large image database acquired with varying digital cameras and lighting conditions. Automatic white balance control proposed by an available commercial camera is not sufficient to provide reproducible color classification. A device-independent color representation may be obtained by applying a chromatic adaptation transform, from a calibrated color checker pattern included in the field of view. Instead of using the standard Macbeth color checker, we suggest to select judicious colors to design a customized pattern from contextual information. A comparative study demonstrates that this approach insures a stronger constancy of the interesting colors before the vision control.