Multispectral camera as spatio-spectrophotometer under uncontrolled illumination

Opt Express. 2019 Jan 21;27(2):1051-1070. doi: 10.1364/OE.27.001051.

Abstract

Multispectral constancy enables the illuminant invariant representation of multi-spectral data. This article proposes an experimental investigation of multispectral constancy through the use of multispectral camera as a spectrophotometer for the reconstruction of surface reflectance. Three images with varying illuminations are captured and the spectra of material surfaces is reconstructed. The acquired images are transformed into canonical representation through the use of diagonal transform and spectral adaptation transform. Experimental results show that use of multispectral constancy is beneficial for both filter-wheel and snapshot multi-spectral cameras. The proposed concept is robust to errors in illuminant estimation and is able to perform well with linear spectral reconstruction method. This work makes us one step closer to the use of multispectral imaging for computer vision.