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A fast white balance algorithm based on pixel greyness

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Abstract

The goal of automatic white balance (AWB) is to maintain colour constancy of an image by removing colour cast caused by un-canonical illuminant. In this paper, we address two limitations associated with a class of AWB algorithms and propose a technique to estimate the illuminant which takes into consideration the internal illumination and all pixels of the image. The estimate is calculated by a weighted average of all pixels. The weight for a pixel is determined from the greyness. The greyness of a pixel is measured from its chroma Cb and Cr in the YCbCr colour space. The experimental results demonstrate that performance of the proposed technique is competitive with that of state-of-the-art AWB algorithms. The proposed algorithm can be implemented in real-time applications, such as in consumer digital cameras due to its low computational complexity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, 3086, Australia

    Ba Thai, Guang Deng & Robert Ross

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  1. Ba Thai
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  2. Guang Deng
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  3. Robert Ross
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Correspondence to Ba Thai.

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Thai, B., Deng, G. & Ross, R. A fast white balance algorithm based on pixel greyness. SIViP 11, 525–532 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-016-0990-6

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