A Color Matching Method for Prediction and Correction of the Color Shifts due to the Illuminant Changes

Abstract

There exist several attempts to develop a system for device-independent color reproduction in color desktop publishing. However, the difference of a color appearance between the original and the reproduced colors occurs when illuminant light is changed. This is because conventional device-independent color matching is calibrated only by the colorimetric values under the standard illuminant such as D50, that is, it is based on the metamerism.
In this study, we present a device-independent color reproduction method which can predict and correct the color shifts due to the illuminant changes. This method adopts the principal components (PCs) of the spectral reflectance as an intermediate color representation. We trained three layered neural networks to perform the transformation from CMY values of the proof printer to PCs, and the transformation from these PCs to C'M'Y' values of dye-sublimation printer. After the learning process, we evaluated the accuracy of the transformation from CMY to C'M'Y' through PCs by the trained networks. As a result, we found that our proposed method has an ability not only to predict but also to correct the color shifts due to the illuminant changes.