Updated version of an interim connection space LabPQR for spectral color reproduction: LabLab

In this paper, we propose a new interim connection space (ICS) called LabLab, which is an updated version of LabPQR, to overcome the drawback that the last three dimensions of LabPQR have no definite colorimetric meanings. We extended and improved the method by which the first three dimensions of LabPQR are deduced to obtain an ICS consisting of two sets of CIELAB values under different illuminants, and the reconstructed spectra from LabLab were obtained by minimizing colorimetric errors by means of the computational formula of the CIE-XYZ tristimulus values combined with least-squares best fit. The improvement obtained from the proposed method was tested to compress and reconstruct the reflectance spectra of the 1950 Natural Color System color chips and more than 50,000 ISO SOCS color patches as well as six multispectral images acquired by multispectral image acquisition systems using 1600 glossy Munsell color chips as training samples. The performance was evaluated by the mean values of color differences between the original and reconstructed spectra under the CIE 1931 standard colorimetric observer and the CIE standard illuminants D50, D55, D65, D75, F2, F7, F11, and A as well as five multichip white LED light sources. The mean and maximum values of the root mean square errors between the original and reconstructed spectra were also calculated. The experimental results show that the proposed three LabLab interim connection spaces significantly outperform principal component analysis, LabPQR, XYZLMS, Fairman-Brill, and LabRGB in colorimetric reconstruction accuracy at the cost of slight reduction of spectral reconstruction accuracy and illuminant independence of color differences of the suggested LabLab interim connection spaces outperform other interim connection spaces. In addition, the presented LabLab interim connection spaces could be quite compatible with the extensively used colorimetric management system since each dimension has definite colorimetric meanings and is perceptually uniform.