Color Constancy via Multi-Scale Region-Weighed Network Guided by Semantics

In obtaining color constancy, estimating the illumination of a scene is the most important task. However, due to unknown light sources and the influence of the external imaging environment, the estimated illumination is prone to color ambiguity. In this article, a learning-based multi-scale region-weighed network guided by semantic features is proposed to estimate the illuminated color of the light source in a scene. Cued by the human brain's processing of color constancy, we use image semantics and scale information to guide the process of illumination estimation. First, we put the image and its semantics into the network, and then obtain the region weights of the image at different scales. After that, through a special weight-pooling layer (WPL), the illumination on each scale is estimated. The final illumination is calculated by weighting each scale. The results of extensive experiments on Color Checker and NUS 8-Camera datasets show that the proposed approach is superior to the current state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness.