In this paper, we study the importance of pre-training for the generalization
capability in the color constancy problem. We propose two novel approaches
based on convolutional autoencoders: an unsupervised pre-training algorithm
using a fine-tuned encoder and a semi-supervised pre-training algorithm using a
novel composite-loss function. This enables us to solve the data scarcity
problem and achieve competitive, to the state-of-the-art, results while
requiring much fewer parameters on ColorChecker RECommended dataset. We further
study the over-fitting phenomenon on the recently introduced version of
INTEL-TUT Dataset for Camera Invariant Color Constancy Research, which has both
field and non-field scenes acquired by three different camera models.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 3 table