A Novel Automatic White Balance Algorithm for the 3D Image of Stereoscopic Endoscopy

Automatic white balance is an important function of stereoscopic endoscopy. The 3D image of stereoscopic endoscopy often contains color mismatch and different luminance between two stereo views. It will lead to many problems applying traditional white balance methods independently for each image of 3D images. In order to solve those problems, we proposed a novel automatic white balance algorithm which consists three steps: choosing the reference image, adjusting the reference image by white balance method and color matching. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve superior result. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is quiet low. The proposed method can be easily applied to stereoscopic endoscopy and obtain high quality 3D images under stressful conditions.