Variations in illumination lead to serious errors in the evaluation of chromatic aberration. We propose an illumination correction model based on the opposition-based learning improved whale optimization algorithm for support vector regression optimization, named "OBL-IWOA-SVR." Because the initial population quality of the whale optimization algorithm has a significant impact on the solution speed and accuracy, the Opposition-based learning strategy is adopted in this article to mix the original population and its opposite individuals and select the best as the new population, replacing the random initialization to generate a more suitable initial population. This increases the diversity of the population and thus overcomes the impact of the quality of the initial population on the algorithm performance. Secondly, the proposed algorithm adopts the adaptive weight and the convergence factor based on the variation of the cosine law to balance the algorithm's global exploration ability and local development ability and enhance the convergence accuracy. Finally, the algorithm utilizes good global searching ability to optimize the penalty factor and nuclear parameters and obtains the optimal support vector machine parameter combination to construct the illumination correction model OBL-IWOA-SVR accurately and robustly. Experimental results show that the illumination correction model proposed in this article is found superior to other models in significance analysis: the root mean square error of the proposed model is 0.0173, the smallest of all illumination correction models. Furthermore, the model exhibits good stability and high illumination estimation accuracy.