A new color constancy algorithm called Cubical Gamut Mapping (CGM) is introduced. CGM is computationally very simple, yet performs better than many currently known algorithms in terms of median illumination estimation error. Moreover, it can be tuned to minimize the maximum error. Being able to reduce the maximum error, possibly at the expense of increased median error, is an advantage over many published color constancy algorithms, which may perform quite well in terms of median illumination-estimation error, but have very poor worst-case performance. CGM is based on principles similar to existing gamut mapping algorithms; however, it represents the gamut of image chromaticities as a simple cube characterized by the image's maximum and minimum rgb chromaticities rather than their more complicated convex hull. It also uses the maximal RGBs as an additional source of information about the illuminant. The estimate of the scene illuminant is obtained by linearly mapping the chromaticity of the maximum RGB, minimum rgb and maximum rgb values. The algorithm is trained off-line on a set of synthetically generated images. Linear programming techniques for optimizing the mapping both in terms of the sum of errors and in terms of the maximum error are used. CGM uses a very simple image pre-processing stage that does not require image segmentation. For each pixel in the image, the pixels in the N-by-N surrounding block are averaged. The pixels for which at least one of the neighbouring pixels in the N-by-N surrounding block differs from the average by more than a given threshold are removed. This pre-processing not only improves CGM, but also improves the performance of other published algorithms such as max RGB and Grey World.
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