An Overview of Color Constancy Algorithms

Color constancy is one of the important research areas with a wide range of applications in the fields of color image processing and computer vision. One such application is video tracking. Color is used as one of the salient features and its robustness to illumination variation is essential to the adaptability of video tracking algorithms. Color constancy can be applied to discount the influence of changing illuminations. In this paper, we present a review of established color constancy approaches. We also investigate whether these approaches in their present form of implementation can be applied to the video tracking problem. The approaches are grouped into two categories, namely, Pre-Calibrated and Data-driven approaches. The paper also talks about the ill-posedness of the color constancy problem, implementation assumptions of color constancy approaches, and problem statement for tracking. Publications on video tracking algorithms involving color correction or color compensation techniques are not included in this review.