
Chapter 7
White balance
7.1 Introduction
We start this chapter by recalling some basic notions of white balance that
were presented in Chapter 1. The white balance process aims at emulating the
color constancy ability of the human visual system and consists of two steps,
illumination estimation and color correction. Ideally it should be performed
not on-camera but afterwards, as offline post-processing: the rationale, as with
demosaicking and denoising algorithms, is that with offline postprocessing we
have much more freedom in terms of what we can do, not being limited by
the constraints of on-camera signal processing (in terms of speed, algorithm
complexit ...