ABC-Former: Auxiliary Bimodal Cross-domain Transformer with Interactive Channel Attention for White Balance

The primary goal of white balance (WB) for sRGB images is to correct inaccurate color temperatures, ensuring that images display natural, neutral colors. While existing WB methods yield reasonable results, their effectiveness is limited. They either focus solely on global color adjustments applied before the camera-specific image signal processing pipeline or rely on end-to-end models that generate WB outputs without accounting for global color trends, leading to suboptimal correction. To address these limitations, we propose an Auxiliary Bimodal Cross-domain Transformer (ABC-Former) that enhances WB correction by leveraging complementary knowledge from global color information from CIELab and RGB histograms alongside sRGB inputs. By introducing an Interactive Channel Attention (ICA) module to facilitate cross-modality global knowledge transfer, ABC-Former achieves more precise WB correction. Experimental results on benchmark WB datasets show that ABC-Former performs favorably against state- of-the-art WB methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/ytpeng-aimlab/ABC-Former.