Auxiliary Reference Samples for Extrapolating Spectral Reflectance from Camera RGB Signals

Surface spectral reflectance is useful for color reproduction. In this study, the reconstruction of spectral reflectance using a conventional camera was investigated. The spectrum reconstruction error could be reduced by interpolating camera RGB signals, in contrast to methods based on basis spectra, such as principal component analysis (PCA). The disadvantage of the interpolation method is that it cannot interpolate samples outside the convex hull of reference samples in the RGB signal space. An interpolation method utilizing auxiliary reference samples (ARSs) to extrapolate the outside samples is proposed in this paper. The ARSs were created using reference samples and color filters. The convex hull of the reference samples and ARSs was expanded to enclose outside samples for extrapolation. A commercially available camera was taken as an example. The results show that with the proposed method, the extrapolation error was smaller than that of the computationally time-consuming weighted PCA method. A low cost and fast detection speed for spectral reflectance recovery can be achieved using a conventional camera.