Separating Reflective and Fluorescent Components Using High Frequency Illumination in the Spectral Domain

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2016 May;38(5):965-78. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2015.2473839. Epub 2015 Aug 27.

Abstract

Hyperspectral imaging is beneficial to many applications but most traditional methods do not consider fluorescent effects which are present in everyday items ranging from paper to even our food. Furthermore, everyday fluorescent items exhibit a mix of reflection and fluorescence so proper separation of these components is necessary for analyzing them. In recent years, effective imaging methods have been proposed but most require capturing the scene under multiple illuminants. In this paper, we demonstrate efficient separation and recovery of reflectance and fluorescence emission spectra through the use of two high frequency illuminations in the spectral domain. With the obtained fluorescence emission spectra from our high frequency illuminants, we then describe how to estimate the fluorescence absorption spectrum of a material given its emission spectrum. In addition, we provide an in depth analysis of our method and also show that filters can be used in conjunction with standard light sources to generate the required high frequency illuminants. We also test our method under ambient light and demonstrate an application of our method to synthetic relighting of real scenes.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't