METHOD FOR ACCURATE REAL-TIME COMPENSATION FOR CHANGING ILLUMINATION SPECTRA IN DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERAS

A method for determining a correction for a spectra of scene illumination based on analysis of color content of a video image, in which average image colors are obtained by considering only those image pixels that have significantly different color from any of its neighboring pixels resulting in selection of only those pixels that lay on the boundaries of monochrome image segments, while avoiding their inner areas. Therefore, the white balance method is not only tolerant to the presence of large non-gray monochrome areas in the image, but also avoids the image areas that have small chrominance values and appear to be gray due to specific illumination spectra, while not actually corresponding to the grey areas of the scene.