Tunable cast remover for digital photographs

The paper describes an adaptive and tunable color cast removal algorithm. This multi-step algorithm first quantifies the strength of the cast by applying a color cast detector, which classifies the input images as having no cast, evident cast, ambiguous cast (images with low cast, or for which whether or not the cast exists is a subjective opinion), or intrinsic cast (images presenting a cast that is probably due to a predominant color we want to preserve, such as in underwater images). The cast remover, a modified version of the white balance algorithm, is then applied in the two cases of evident or ambiguous casts. The method we propose has been tuned and tested, with positive results, on a large data set of images downloaded from personal web-pages, or acquired by various digital cameras.