Estimating illumination chromaticity via support vector regression

Support vector regression is applied to the problem of estimating the chromaticity of the light illuminating a scene from a color histogram of an image of the scene. Illumination estimation is fundamental to white balancing digital color images and to understanding human color constancy. Under controlled experimental conditions, the support vector method is shown to perform well. Its performance is compared to other published methods including neural network color constancy, color by correlation, and shades of gray. (C) 2006 Society for Imaging Science and Technology.