PhotoTechEDU Day 31 - Color Balance: Babies, Rugs & Sunsets

Google Tech Talks December, 12 2007 Achieving pleasing color balance is one of the most important and difficult problems in photographic systems; if the color balance is off, other image quality attributes drop in important and the result is unacceptable. In this talk I will discuss the differences between color balance and white balance for both photographic and machine vision applications and I will outline the literature of the subject. I will explain some of the more basic and some of the more advanced methods and relate these to complexity and system calibration issues. I will give several examples that show how some methods can fail and why some images can be extremely difficult. I will touch on the relationship between color balance and color perception and how this differentiates photographic systems from machine vision systems. The goal of PhotoTechEDU is to have a Photographic Technology short course at Google. The course will teach Google engineers: useful properties of light and image formation theory and techniques of photographic optics and image capture theory of colorimetry and techniques of color reproduction where and how photography is being used in Google products and projects what tools exist inside Google for photographic image storage, processing, etc. and lots more... The course will be serialized, meeting once a week for one hour, for at least 12 weeks, with probable extension as topics of interest are identified. Homework problems and projects will be suggested at various meetings, but they are completely optional. No formal class signup is necessary. You can find details on this wiki page: http://wiki.corp.google.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/PhotoTechEDU Speaker: Paul Hubel Dr. Paul M. Hubel has been working as Chief Image Scientist at Foveon, Inc. since 2002. His work includes the design of image processing algorithms and sensor architectures for high, middle, and low end cameras. Before joining Foveon, Dr. Hubel worked for ten years as a Principal Project Scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories working on color algorithms for digital cameras, photofinishing, scanners, copiers, and printers. Dr. Hubel received his B.Sc. in Optics from The University of Rochester in 1986, and his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1990. His D.Phil thesis is titled "Colour Reflection Holography". As a graduate student, Dr. Hubel worked part-time at the Rowland Institute for Science under Dr. E.H. Land and later as a Post Doctoral Fellow at the MIT-Media Laboratory. Dr. Hubel has published over 30 technical papers, book chapters, and authored 25 patents. Dr. Hubel is a member of IS&T and SPIE, and has served as the technical and general chair of the IS&T/SID Color Imaging Conference.