Leveraging the Availability of Two Cameras for Illuminant Estimation

Abdelrahman Abdelhamed, Abhijith Punnappurath, Michael S. Brown; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 6637-6646

Most modern smartphones are now equipped with two rear-facing cameras -- a main camera for standard imaging and an additional camera to provide wide-angle or telephoto zoom capabilities. In this paper, we leverage the availability of these two cameras for the task of illumination estimation using a small neural network to perform the illumination prediction. Specifically, if the two cameras' sensors have different spectral sensitivities, the two images provide different spectral measurements of the physical scene. A linear 3x3 color transform that maps between these two observations -- and that is unique to a given scene illuminant -- can be used to train a lightweight neural network comprising no more than 1460 parameters to predict the scene illumination. We demonstrate that this two-camera approach with a lightweight network provides results on par or better than much more complicated illuminant estimation methods operating on a single image. We validate our method's effectiveness through extensive experiments on radiometric data, a quasi-real two-camera dataset we generated from an existing single camera dataset, as well as a new real image dataset that we captured using a smartphone with two rear-facing cameras.