Color invariant for daylight changes: relaxing the constraints on illuminants.
We extend previous work that addressed the problem of color changes on reflective surfaces resulting from changes in the daylight spectrum. In that work, we constrained the illuminants to a family represented by the Wien approximation to Planck's formula in order to derive a function of the three camera outputs that is invariant to daylight changes. In this work, we show that the constraint on the form of the illuminants can be relaxed and that a much more general form is permissible. We use principal components analysis on the logarithm of the illumination to represent the CIE standard in the more general form and show that the result closely represents the standard. We recalculate the exponent used in the invariant for our camera from the extended theory and obtain a result that duplicates the one found by empirical means used in our previous work.