Correcting cross-media instrument metamerism for reflectance estimation in multispectral imaging

In multispectral imaging, the color accuracy of spectral reflectance estimation degrades significantly if the medium of test samples is different from that of calibration samples. This occurs mainly for two reasons, i.e., the different characteristics of spectral reflectances and the different measurement principles between an imaging system and a spectrophotometer. In this paper, this problem is referred to as cross-media instrument metamerism. We propose to correct it by using calibration samples from a standard color chart and a limited number of tuning samples with a target medium as a priori knowledge. The reflectance transform is computed by using both calibration and tuning samples, and the metamerism transform is calculated by modeling the correlation of camera responses between neighboring imaging channels. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces satisfactory spectral and colorimetric accuracy in reflectance estimation. The method could be deployed in practical applications when the available samples of certain media are inadequate for accurate reflectance estimation in a multispectral imaging system.