Fast color correction using principal regions mapping in different color spaces

A color correction method for balancing the color appearances, among a group of images, about a specified object or scene, such as panoramic images and object movies, is developed and tested in this paper. In order to increase the running speed of color correction and reduce the out-of-gamut color pixels, we introduce the selection of principal regions. The average color values of principal regions are used to construct the low-degree (up to degree two) polynomial mapping functions from the source images to the corrected images. The functions are run in the decorrelated color spaces. Our method is tested using real and synthetic images. The results of these tests show the proposed method can get a better performance than other existing methods. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.