AB-chromaticity histogram analysis works well most of the time, but it may not work well when the color cast is not severe. To overcome this problem, we propose an improved, two-step automatic cast-detection method. First, we compute the RGB color variance to evaluate the quality of the input image. If this variance is very small, we extract near-neutral color areas and compute the local ab-chromaticity histogram. We use this local ab-chromaticity histogram to evaluate the quality of the input image. This method has been tested in ZTE’s video surveillance system. The results show that the proposed method produces better results based on subjective evaluation and is more efficient in various conditions.