HSICT: A method for romoving highlight and shading in color image

In this paper, the problem of removing highlight and shading in color image is addressed, and a novel method called highlight and shading invariant color transform (HSICT) is proposed for this purpose. HSICT can be accomplished in a process of three steps: (1) Illumination color estimation is achieved by using two different color distributions; (2) A linear transform is applied to eliminate the influence of highlight; (3) The effect of shading is removed by normalization. Experiments illustrate that HSICT can not only effectively remove highlight and shading in color image, but also can be easily combined with other algorithms in many fields, such as segmentation and edge detection.