CLCC: Contrastive Learning for Color Constancy

Yi-Chen Lo, Chia-Che Chang, Hsuan-Chao Chiu, Yu-Hao Huang, Chia-Ping Chen, Yu-Lin Chang, Kevin Jou; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 8053-8063

Abstract


In this paper, we present CLCC, a novel contrastive learning framework for color constancy. Contrastive learning has been applied for learning high-quality visual representations for image classification. One key aspect to yield useful representations for image classification is to design illuminant invariant augmentations. However, the illuminant invariant assumption conflicts with the nature of the color constancy task, which aims to estimate the illuminant given a raw image. Therefore, we construct effective contrastive pairs for learning better illuminant-dependent features via a novel raw-domain color augmentation. On the NUS-8 dataset, our method provides 17.5% relative improvements over a strong baseline, reaching state-of-the-art performance without increasing model complexity. Furthermore, our method achieves competitive performance on the Gehler dataset with 3x fewer parameters compared to top-ranking deep learning methods. More importantly, we show that our model is more robust to different scenes under close proximity of illuminants, significantly reducing 28.7% worst-case error in data-sparse regions. Our code is available at https://github.com/howardyclo/clcc-cvpr21.

Related Material


[pdf] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Lo_2021_CVPR, author = {Lo, Yi-Chen and Chang, Chia-Che and Chiu, Hsuan-Chao and Huang, Yu-Hao and Chen, Chia-Ping and Chang, Yu-Lin and Jou, Kevin}, title = {CLCC: Contrastive Learning for Color Constancy}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}, month = {June}, year = {2021}, pages = {8053-8063} }