Fast Fourier Color Constancy

11/23/2016

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by   Jonathan T. Barron, et al.

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We present Fast Fourier Color Constancy (FFCC), a color constancy algorithm which solves illuminant estimation by reducing it to a spatial localization task on a torus. By operating in the frequency domain, FFCC produces lower error rates than the previous state-of-the-art by 13-20 times faster. This unconventional approach introduces challenges regarding aliasing, directional statistics, and preconditioning, which we address. By producing a complete posterior distribution over illuminants instead of a single illuminant estimate, FFCC enables better training techniques, an effective temporal smoothing technique, and richer methods for error analysis. Our implementation of FFCC runs at 700 frames per second on a mobile device, allowing it to be used as an accurate, real-time, temporally-coherent automatic white balance algorithm.