Color constancy using faces

In this work, we investigate how illuminant estimation can be performed exploiting the color statistics extracted from the faces automatically detected in the image. The proposed method is based on two observations: first, skin colors tend to form a cluster in the color space, making it a cue to estimate the illuminant in the scene; second, many photographic images are portraits or contain people. The proposed method has been tested on a public dataset of images in RAW format, using both a manual and a real face detector. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The proposed method can be directly used in many digital still camera processing pipelines with an embedded face detector working on gray level images. © 2012 IEEE.