Spectral characterization of a color scanner by adaptive estimation

A new method of spectral characterization for color scanners by the use of adaptive estimation is proposed. It deals with estimation of high-dimensional reflectance vectors from low-dimensional scanner response vectors when the scanner departs from linearity. We first investigate the spectral linearity of the scanner, and then estimate the spectral reflectance adaptively. based on the local statistics of a set of neighboring training samples. As the proposed characterization method does not utilize the mathematically recovered spectral responsivity, its inherent inaccuracy is not critical to the spectral characterization. Experimental results showed significant advantage of adaptive estimation when compared with other methods. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.