Color Stabilization Along Time and Across Shots of the Same Scene, for One or Several Cameras of Unknown Specifications

Javier Vazquez-Corral, Marcelo Bertalmío

Abstract:

We propose a method for color stabilization of shots
of the same scene, taken under the same illumination, where one
image is chosen as reference and one or several other images
are modified so that their colors match those of the reference.
We make use of two crucial but often overlooked observations:
firstly, that the core of the color correction chain in a digital
camera is simply a multiplication by a 3x3 matrix; secondly,
that to color-match a source image to a reference image we don’t
need to compute their two color correction matrices, it’s enough
to compute the operation that transforms one matrix into the
other. This operation is a 3x3 matrix as well, which we call H.
Once we have H, we just multiply by it each pixel value of the
source and obtain an image which matches in color the reference.
To compute H we only require a set of pixel correspondences,
we don’t need any information about the cameras used, neither
models nor specifications or parameter values. We propose an
implementation of our framework which is very simple and fast,
and show how it can be successfully employed in a number
of situations, comparing favourably with the state of the art.
There is a wide range of applications of our technique, both for
amateur and professional photography and video: color matching
for multi-camera TV broadcasts, color matching for 3D cinema,
color stabilization for amateur video, etc.