# The Past and the Present of the Color Checker Dataset Misuse

## TL;DR

This paper reviews the history and misuse of the widely used Color Checker dataset in computational color constancy, highlighting errors caused by improper black level handling and recent attempts to correct them.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive history and analysis of the dataset's misuse, clarifies the origins of errors, and discusses recent correction efforts to prevent future mistakes.

## Key findings

- Widespread misuse due to improper black level handling
- Recent correction attempts still contain errors
- Clarification aims to improve future dataset usage

## Abstract

The pipelines of digital cameras contain a part for computational color constancy, which aims to remove the influence of the illumination on the scene colors. One of the best known and most widely used benchmark datasets for this problem is the Color Checker dataset. However, due to the improper handling of the black level in its images, this dataset has been widely misused and while some recent publications tried to alleviate the problem, they nevertheless erred and created additional wrong data. This paper gives a history of the Color Checker dataset usage, it describes the origins and reasons for its misuses, and it explains the old and new mistakes introduced in the most recent publications that tried to handle the issue. This should, hopefully, help to prevent similar future misuses.