Abstract
A method is described for estimating the colors of object surfaces when the measured image contains highlight and interreflection effects. I suppose that when multiple objects of inhomogeneous dielectric materials such as plastics are placed close together, the observed color vectors from the object surfaces are expressed in a linear combination of the illumination color and the object colors. First, we estimate the illumination color from highlight areas in the measured image. Next, I estimate the chromaticity of the object color inherent in each surface from the chromaticity distribution of the measured image. I define a chromaticity plane on which the chromaticity coordinates of any observed colors are represented as a relative coordinate system on the basis of, the illumination color. The problem of estimating object color is then reduced to finding the vertices of a polygon. Finally, I demonstrate the feasibility of the method in an experiment, where the object color image without highlight and interreflection is recovered.
