Photographic Color Reproduction Based on Color Variation Characteristics of Digital Camera

In this paper, a new technique for color reproduction based on color variation characteristics of digital camera under a dim light condition is proposed. Generally, photographers should adjust a camera exposure properly for obtaining an image with real color tone of subjects. Thus, in case of taking a picture under a dim light condition, the exposure time of a camera has to be relatively longer than the one under a bright light condition. Although images with real color tone of the subject are obtained, the images may get blurred due to the shaky hands of photographer holding the camera. In order to avoid the blur effect, an input image is captured from a camera set as a short exposure time under a dim light condition. Then we propose a method to reproduce color tone of the dim input image. To this end, color variation characteristics which represent color variations of a digital camera are first extracted by analyzing the Macbeth color checker images taken under various exposure values. Then, a color reproduction is performed by an estimation based on the color variation characteristics. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method has achieved better performance of color reproduction, compared with existing methods.