IMAGE-DEPENDENT COLOR SHIFTING OF STRONGLY COLOR SHIFTED IMAGES

A method of correcting color shifts produced by improper imaging in a natural scene image including the steps of: converting an electronically encoded natural scene image described in terms of red-green-blue color space to electronic encoding terms of luminance, chrominance color space; sorting each luminance signal forming the image into one of a plurality of predetermined luminance magnitude bands; for each luminance magnitude band, calculating the band average chrominance signal of each pixel in the band to determine the relative amounts of each color in the band; for each band average chrominance signals, averaging the band average chrominance signals over a subset of the luminance magnitude bands to derive an interband average chrominance value; comparing each interband average chrominance value with neutral gray color to determine a correction signal; for each luminance magnitude band, adding the correction signal to the color of each pixel in the band.