Different imaging conditions often result in different color reproductions. Hence, color reproductions must be calibrated when images are captured under different imaging conditions. Herein, a new color calibration method based on iterative distributed transfer (IDT) is proposed. IDT is used to preliminarily calibrate color reproductions, and the results are known as preliminary results. Because IDT may result in unnatural colors, namely false colors, the projected color components of the input image are used to suppress the false colors, and the results are the final results. To obtain the final results, a series of projection coefficients must be calculated. By minimizing the objective function, in which the preliminary results are used as the target for the final results, the projection coefficients are calculated. Simultaneously, the weight associated with the false color is incorporated into the objective function such that the final results do not depend significantly on the preliminary results when the IDT yields false colors. Meanwhile, to quantitatively evaluate the false color, a false color index is proposed herein. The proposed method can suppress false colors and offers high color-adjustment capabilities. The effectiveness of the method is verified based on evaluation indexes and the observation of experimental results.

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