GCC: Generative Color Constancy via Diffusing a Color Checker

Chen-Wei Chang, Cheng-De Fan, Chia-Che Chang, Yi-Chen Lo, Yu-Chee Tseng, Jiun-Long Huang, Yu-Lun Liu; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 10868-10878

Abstract


Color constancy methods often struggle to generalize across different camera sensors due to varying spectral sensitivities. We present GCC, which leverages diffusion models to inpaint color checkers into images for illumination estimation. Our key innovations include (1) a single-step deterministic inference approach that inpaints color checkers reflecting scene illumination, (2) a Laplacian decomposition technique that preserves checker structure while allowing illumination-dependent color adaptation, and (3) a mask-based data augmentation strategy for handling imprecise color checker annotations. By harnessing rich priors from pre-trained diffusion models, GCC demonstrates strong robustness in challenging cross-camera scenarios. These results highlight our method's effective generalization capability across different camera characteristics without requiring sensor-specific training, making it a versatile and practical solution for real-world applications.

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[pdf] [supp] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Chang_2025_CVPR, author = {Chang, Chen-Wei and Fan, Cheng-De and Chang, Chia-Che and Lo, Yi-Chen and Tseng, Yu-Chee and Huang, Jiun-Long and Liu, Yu-Lun}, title = {GCC: Generative Color Constancy via Diffusing a Color Checker}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR)}, month = {June}, year = {2025}, pages = {10868-10878} }