Illumination Estimation from Dichromatic Planes

Adopting the dichromatic reflection model under the assumption of neutral interface reflection, the color of the illuminating light can be estimated by intersecting the planes that the color response of two or more different materials describe. From the color response of any given region, most approaches estimate a single plane on the assumption that only a single material is imaged. This assumption, however, is often violated in cluttered scenes. In this paper, rather than a single planar model, several coexisting planes are used to explain the observed color response. In estimating the illuminant, a set of candidate lights is assessed for goodness of fit given the assumed number of coexisting planes. The candidate light giving the minimum error fit is then chosen as representative of the scene illuminant. The performance of the proposed approach is explored on real images.