Robust pixel-wise illuminant estimation algorithm for images with a low bit-depth

Conventional illuminant estimation methods were developed for scenes with a uniform illumination, while recently developed methods, such as pixel-wise methods, estimate the illuminants at the pixel level, making them applicable to a wider range of scenes. It was found that the same pixel-wise algorithm had very different performance when applied to images with different bit-depths, with up to a 30% decrease in accuracy for images having a lower bit-depth. Image signal processing (ISP) pipelines, however, prefer to deal with images with a lower bit-depth. In this paper, the analyses show that such a reduction was due to the loss of details and increase of noises, which were never identified in the past. We propose a method combining the L1 loss optimization and physical-constrained post-processing. The proposed method was found to result in around 40% higher estimation accuracy, in comparison to the state-of-the-art DNN-based methods.