DxO AutoCLS: Perfect Color Uniformity for Smartphone Cameras

The proliferation of mobiles with cameras in recent years means that everyone is now a photographer, and people are increasingly aware of image quality. The mobile camera has improved enormously to become a major selling factor when choosing a phone.

Image quality is a high priority for end users, and world digital image processing leader DxO Labs has developed DxO AutoCLS embedded software as the solution to one of the crucial quality issues still causing major headaches for manufacturers - the marked lack of color uniformity that affects virtually all phones to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the actual image involved.

Read on to find out how DxO AutoCLS tackles this tough problem, and why it is more successful than other current solutions.

 

Color uniformity is a major problem in smartphones, visible on the display

 

Despite the huge progress that has been made in improving image quality on many fronts, non-expert users are still able to notice a lack of quality in certain areas - and talking about it!

DxO, a world-leading specialist in digital image processing, is well placed to understand the issues involved here, and has come up with a complete solution that easily beats the other attempted workarounds - DxO AutoCLS.

Although users are generally remarkably tolerant of absolute color rendering, they are much more sensitive to relative color rendering — typically, a lack of uniformity, i.e. color that changes from the center to the corners of the image, independent of scene content, and referred to as color shading. End-users readily notice levels of color shading as low as 2%, yet current cameras often exhibit 30% or even worse. This is a major problem that affects virtually all current phone cameras, a fundamental flaw inherent in their compact design.

Learn more about the color shading problem.

Per-unit calibration attempts to measure the color uniformity of each phone and store this information so as to be able to compensate for the shading. It fails with many indoor illuminants and mixed lighting situations. At best, it is only ever partially successful; at worst, it may even make the perceived results worse. This technique is used in all the phones cited in the complaints from users here.

Using a hybrid filter can certainly improve results, but involves the bulk and cost of an extra component. What’s more, the additional filter cuts down some of the wanted light reaching the sensor, leading to increased noise under typical low-light conditions - again, something that even non-expert users are particularly sensitive to.