Auto white balance system using adaptive color samples for mobile devices

This paper presents a novel auto white balance (AWB) algorithm for images based on an YCbCr color space. The proposed algorithm divides all the pixels into fourteen groups by Y luminance and CbCr color components. For accuracy, we employ an adaptive color samples that can obtain the sum of the accumulated pixels up to the standard group for estimating a degree of white object’s color changes. The color samples are used for the adjustment of the relative amounts of red, green, and blue primary colors. In order to avoid a field-flicker noise of video streams, the proposed algorithm adopts infinite impulse response (IIR) filters that vary the operating speed of overall AWB system. The performance of the algorithm is also verified by implementing the hardware of the system.