Abstract Computational color constancy is a very important topic in computer vision and has attracted many researchers’ attention. Recently, lots of research has shown the effects of using high level visual content cues for improving illumination estimation. However, nearly all the existing methods are essentially combinational strategies in which image’s content analysis is only used to guide the combination or selection from a variety of individual illumination estimation methods. In this paper, we propose a novel bilayer sparse coding model for illumination estimation that considers image similarity in terms of both low level color distribution and high level image scene content simultaneously. For the purpose, the image’s scene content information is integrated with its color distribution to obtain optimal illumination estimation model. The experimental results on real-world image sets show that our algorithm is superior to some prevailing illumination estimation methods, even better than some combinational methods.