An a priori shading correction technique for contact imaging devices

Digital imaging devices are increasingly used for color measurements in fields such as forensics, the food industry, and ecological and medical research. Especially concerning the skin, in the follow-up of benign or malignant lesions, it is crucial to ensure that the measured colors are accurate and reproducible. Several color calibration methods having been presented over the last few years. However, the choice of illuminant used remains a major source of color misinterpretation, thus, much effort is being spent in trying to evaluate this a posteriori. The device presented overcomes this problem by integrating its own light source, although corrections in lighting heterogeneity are still required. In this paper, we present a lighting modelling technique used for shading correction which improves color consistency (as assessed by ∆E evaluation versus colorimeter), noise filtering, computation time, and memory consumption for this type of device.