Adaptive White Point Extraction based on Dark Channel Prior for Automatic White Balance

This paper presents a novel automatic white balance (AWB) algorithm for consumer imaging devices. While existing AWB methods require reference white patches to correct color, the proposed method performs the AWB function using only an input image in two steps: i) white point detection, and ii) color constancy gain computation. Based on the dark channel prior assumption, a white point or region can be accurately extracted, because the intensity of a sufficiently bright achromatic region is higher than that of other regions in all color channels. In order to finally correct the color, the proposed method computes color constancy gain values based on the Y component in the XYZ color space. Experimental results show that the proposed method gives better color-corrected images than recent existing methods. Moreover, the proposed method is suitable for real-time implementation, since it does not need a frame memory for iterative optimization. As a result, it can be applied to various consumer imaging devices, including mobile phone cameras, compact digital cameras, and computational cameras with coded color.