Color constant color indexing

Objects can be recognized on the basis of their color alone by color indexing, a technique developed by Swain-Ballard (1991) which involves matching color-space histograms. Color indexing fails, however, when the incident illumination varies either spatially or spectrally. Although this limitation might be overcome by preprocessing with a color constancy algorithm, we instead propose histogramming color ratios. Since the ratios of color RGB triples from neighboring locations are relatively insensitive to changes in the incident illumination, this circumvents the need for color constancy preprocessing. Results of tests with the new color-constant-color-indexing algorithm on synthetic and real images show that it works very well even when the illumination varies spatially in its intensity and color.>