AUTOMATIC WHITE BALANCE DETECTION AND CORRECTION OF AN IMAGE CAPTURED IN A DIGITAL CAMERA

A digital camera includes a lens and a plurality of color filters adjacent the lens. An array of detectors such as CCDs each receive, through the lens and a corresponding one of the color filters, light reflected from a scene. Each detector outputs a signal representative of an amount of light it receives. Circuitry is connected to the array for processing the signals from the detectors and generating a set of digital image data including a chromaticity value and a luminance value of a plurality of pixels representing an uncorrected image of the scene. A control circuit maps a two-dimensional representation of the digital image data into a two-dimensional representation of a set of reference image data and adjusts selected ones of the values of the set of digital image data in accordance with a predetermined transform to white balance the uncorrected image of the scene and produce a modified set of digital image data representing a corrected image of the scene.