The recovery of surface spectral reflectance using the quadcolor camera was numerically studied. Assume that the RGB channels of the quadcolor camera are the same as the Nikon D5100 tricolor camera. The spectral sensitivity of the fourth signal channel was tailored using a color filter. Munsell color chips were used as reflective surfaces. When the interpolation method or the weighted principal component analysis (wPCA) method is used to reconstruct spectra, using the quadcolor camera can effectively reduce the mean spectral error of the test samples compared to using the tricolor camera. Except for computation time, the interpolation method outperforms the wPCA method in spectrum reconstruction. A long-pass optical filter can be applied to the fourth channel for reducing the mean spectral error. A short-pass optical filter can be applied to the fourth channel for reducing the mean color difference, but the mean spectral error will be larger. Due to the small color difference, the quadcolor camera using an optimized short-pass filter may be suitable as an imaging colorimeter. It was found that an empirical design rule to keep the color difference small is to reduce the error in fitting the color-matching functions using the camera spectral sensitivity functions.
Keywords: linear interpolation; multispectral imaging; quadcolor camera; spectral reflectance recovery; spectrum reconstruction; weighted principal component analysis.