Recovery of spectral reflectances of objects and color image reproduction

Abstract

It is very important to recover spectral reflectances of imaged objects accurately for the record of the precious art paintings in digital archive and for the reproduction of them under variety illuminants. The accuracy of the recovery depends on the recovery models and on the spectral sensitivities of sensors. Although the Wiener estimate gives very accurate recovery of the reflectances, prior knowledge of spectral reflectances about the several points on the imaged painting is required to estimate the noise variance of an image acquisition system. We have already proposed a new method to estimate the noise variance of the system and to recover spectral reflectances of the art paintings by using the estimated variance. In this paper, we report the experimental results of the color reproduction of many art paintings of which spectral reflectances are recovered by the proposal.