Color Image Enhancement Using Vector Rotation Based on Color Constancy

칼라 항상성에 기초한 벡터 회전을 이용한 칼라 영상 향상

Color image is largely corrupted by various ambient illumination. However, human perceives always white color as white under any illumination because of a characteristic of human vision, called color constancy. In the conventional algorithm which applied the constancy effect, after the RGB color space is transformed to the IHS(Intensity, Hue, and Saturation) color space, then the hue is preserved and the intensity or the saturation is properly enhanced. Then the enhanced IHS color is reversely transformed to the RGB color space. In this process, the color distortion is included due to the color gamut error. But in the proposed algorithm, there is not transformation. In that, the RGB color is considered as 3 dimensional color vector and we assume that white color is the natural daylight. As the color vector of the illumination can be calculated as the average vector of R, G, and B image, we can achieve the constancy effect by simply rotating the illumination vector to the white color vector. The simulation results show the efficiency of the vector rotating process for color image enhancement.