Use of spectral sensitivity variability in reflectance recovery from colorimetric information

There have been numerous methods for accessing the reflectance spectra; some methods enable one to obtain the spectra directly, such as using a spectrophotometer, hyper-spectral camera, and so forth. Even though the accuracy by which the spectra are obtained can be very high, the high price of these methods could pose an obstacle. On the other hand, there has been an interest in estimation of the spectral reflectance from colorimetric information that is more easily attainable; the accuracy in this case might not be as high but these methods are the most cost efficient. It is aimed, in this paper, to amalgamate the low price and high accuracy of the preceding approaches through relating spectral estimation to spectral sensitivity variability. The work is split into two major parts. The first part of the paper describes spectral sensitivity variability of humans and cameras in a theoretical manner and how it can be used in spectral recovery. In the second part, an attempt is made to extend the theory to real situations. At the end, it is shown how increasing the number of disparate colorimetric data of a specific object using the proposed methods aids in estimating spectral reflectance more accurately in a manner comparable to multi-spectral cameras. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America