Estimation of spectral reflectance curves from multispectral image data

A technique is presented for estimating spectral reflectance curves from multispectral image data even if the spectral samples are obtained from channels whose spectral responsivity is not narrowband. It is demonstrated that these reflectance estimates can be written as a linear combination of the spectral samples and that, analogous to Shannon's sampling theorem, if the spectral reflectance is a natural cubic spline, it can be estimated exactly provided the number of spectral channels is sufficiently large. Simulation results suggest that the accuracy of the spectral reflectance estimates is quite good and very insensitive to the spectral responsivity shapes.