Color Constancy From a Pure Color View: An Edge-Aware Algorithm for a Wider Application

The development of imaging technologies allows personal electronic devices to have telephoto and close-up cameras. The images captured by these cameras sometimes are dominated by a single color (i.e., pure color images). In our earlier work, the PolyU Pure Color dataset was collected and the Pure Color Constancy (PCC) method was proposed, which was the first study investigating color constancy for pure color images. In order to make the method more robust, especially when the images are not as extreme as those included in the PolyU Pure Color dataset, an edge-aware Pure Color Constancy (ePCC) method is proposed in this article. It adopts a similar architecture as the PCC method, with four additional color features derived from the edge map of an image as the input. Moreover, the PolyU Pure Color dataset V2 was collected. It includes 1271 images, which are not as extreme as those in the PolyU Pure Color dataset V1 and cover a wider range of illuminant colors. The proposed ePCC method was found to have better performance than the PCC method on pure color images, reducing the angular error by 10% with slight increases in the number of parameters and computational resources. Moreover, the ePCC method also resulted in comparable performance to the various state-of-the-art learning-based methods on images of normal scenes.