Image-based separation of reflective and fluorescent components using illumination variant and invariant color

Traditionally, researchers tend to exclude fluorescence from color appearance algorithms in computer vision and image processing because of its complexity. In reality, fluorescence is a very common phenomenon observed in many objects, from gems and corals, to different kinds of writing paper, and to our clothes. In this paper, we provide detailed theories of fluorescence phenomenon. In particular, we show that the color appearance of fluorescence is unaffected by illumination in which it differs from ordinary reflectance. Moreover, we show that the color appearance of objects with reflective and fluorescent components can be represented as a linear combination of the two components. A linear model allows us to separate the two components using images taken under unknown illuminants using independent component analysis (ICA). The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using digital images of various fluorescent objects.