Image white balance processing system and method

Abstract

One limitation of traditional imaging systems is that they are only programmed to correct for a single color of illuminant in a scene. In multi-illuminant scenes, the detected illuminant color may correspond to some mixture of scene illuminants. This may lead to incomplete color correction, wherein, e.g., the dominant illuminant is corrected for but the color cast caused by secondary illuminants is still visible, or an at least partially visible color cast remains from multiple of the scene illuminants. Thus, the techniques disclosed herein comprise: obtaining an image of a scene; generating an illumination map for the obtained image; dividing the values in the illumination map to determine a number of estimated illuminant regions, wherein each region corresponds to at least one estimated illuminant present in the captured scene; estimating a white point for each region; and applying white balancing operations, based on the estimated white points for each region.