Intersecting Color Manifolds

Logvinenko’s color atlas theory provides a structure in which a complete set of color-equivalent material and illumination pairs can be generated to match any given input RGB color. In chromaticity space, the set of such pairs forms a 2-dimensional manifold embedded in a 4-dimensional space. For singleilluminant scenes, the illumination for different input RGB values must be contained in all the corresponding manifolds. The proposed illumination-estimation method estimates the scene illumination based on calculating the intersection of the illuminant components of the respective manifolds through a Hough-like voting process. Overall, the performance on the two datasets for which camera sensitivity functions are available is comparable to existing methods. The advantage of the formulating the illumination-estimation in terms of manifold intersection is that it expresses the constraints provided by each available RGB measurement within a sound theoretical foundation.