Fast automatic white balancing method by color histogram stretching

A white balancing method by adaptively stretching R, G and B color histograms is proposed. Different from the traditional white balancing methods which need to estimate illuminant, our method exploits the color content of image directly. Compared our method with Gray World, White Patch, Shade of Gray and 2nd order Grey Edge algorithms on 50 indoor images and 50 outdoor images, the proposed method is very simple and fast. It is suitable to be used in real-time imaging systems.