Fast light mixture estimation with graphics processors

The state-of-the-art of white balance technique can handle photos taken under mixed lighting, such as indoor/outdoor or flash/ambient light types. However, the cost for the faithful result is the long CPU time that precludes interaction on personal computers. In this paper, we use commodity graphics processors (GPUs) to accelerate the light mixture estimation for spatially varying white balance. Our implementation on an NVIDIA G80 GPU achieves a performance improvement of around 30X over the dual-thread CPU-based counterpart. Our method enables fast photo white balance at digital home, and can also be used to accelerate pattern recognition and matting applications. © 2009 Binary Information Press.