MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS OF OBJECT REFLECTANCE SPECTRA

Recent algorithms developed in the field of color vision make assumptions based on the spectral reflectance curves of Munsell chips and natural materials. some of them rely on data collected many years ago, which is partially incomplete in the visible spectrum, or contains many occurrences of the same material in it. In this article, we present a set of new measurements of different materials. In particular we measured the spectral reflectance of Munsell chips, paints, and various natural materials in the 390-730-nm range. In addition, we have analyzed, through principal-component analysis, the possibility of representing the data collected with a set of basis functions. We show the implications of varying the number of principal components used (from 7 down to 3) on the errors introduced using this method. (C) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.