A Large Image Database for Color Constancy Research

We present a study on various statistics relevant to research on color constancy. Many of these analyses could not have been done before simply because a large database for color constancy was not available. Our image database consists of approximately 11,000 images in which the RGB color of the ambient illuminant in each scene is measured. To build such a large database we used a novel set-up consisting of a digital video camera with a neutral gray sphere attached to the camera so that the sphere always appears in the field of view. Using a gray sphere instead of the standard gray card facilitates measurement of the variation in illumination as a function of incident angle. The study focuses on the analysis of the distribution of various illuminants in the natural scenes and the correlation between the rg-chromaticity of colors recorded by the camera and the rg-chromaticity of the ambient illuminant. We also investigate the possibility of improving the performance of the naïve Gray World algorithm by considering a sequence of consecutive frames instead of a single image. The set of images is publicly available and can also be used as a database for testing color constancy algorithms.