Reiner Lenz | PubMed Health

PubMed2007

Calibrating color cameras using metameric blacks.

Spectral calibration of digital cameras based on the spectral data of commercially available calibration charts is an ill-conditioned problem that has an infinite number of solutions. We introduce a method to estimate the sensor's spectral sensitivity function based on metamers. For a given patch on the calibration chart we construct numerical metamers by computing convex linear combinations of spectra from calibration chips with lower and higher sensor response values. The difference between the measured reflectance spectrum and the numerical metamer lies in the null space of the sensor. For each measured spectrum we use this procedure to compute a collection of color signals that lie in the null space of the sensor. For a collection of such spaces we compute the robust principal components, and we obtain an estimate of the sensor by computing the common null space spanned by these vectors. Our approach has a number of advantages over standard techniques: It is robust to outliers and is not dominated by larger response values, and it offers the ability to evaluate the goodness of the solution where it is possible to show that the solution is optimal, given the data, if the calculated range is one dimensional.

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PubMed2005

Statistical properties of color-signal spaces.

In applications of principal component analysis (PCA) it has often been observed that the eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue has only nonnegative entries when the vectors of the underlying stochastic process have only nonnegative values. This has been used to show that the coordinate vectors in PCA are all located in a cone. We prove that the nonnegativity of the first eigenvector follows from the Perron-Frobenius (and Krein-Rutman theory). Experiments show also that for stochastic processes with nonnegative signals the mean vector is often very similar to the first eigenvector. This is not true in general, but we first give a heuristical explanation why we can expect such a similarity. We then derive a connection between the dominance of the first eigenvalue and the similarity between the mean and the first eigenvector and show how to check the relative size of the first eigenvalue without actually computing it. In the last part of the paper we discuss the implication of theoretical results for multispectral color processing.

Algorithms↗