Automatic white balance method for cellular phone

초록

In these days, most of cellular phones have built-in digital camera. As number of pixels approaches to that of digital still cameras, consumer's expectation of image quality taken by cellular phone camera is increasing. Automatic white balance is a function to provide illuminant independent image quality. In this paper, a new automatic white balance method suitable for cellular phone is proposed. Camera images are divided into three categories. They are first classified as images with dominant color or images with variety of colors. Images having variety of colors are further divided into two subclasses based on the existence of highlight area; images with and without highlight regions. Three different AWB techniques are designed and applied to each of three classes. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique yields better performance than the conventional methods. © 2009 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.