Turning a Digital Camera into an Absolute 2D Tele-Colorimeter

Abstract

We present a simple and effective technique for absolute colorimetric camera characterization, invariant to changes in exposure/aperture and scene irradiance, suitable in a wide range of applications including image-based reflectance measurements, spectral pre-filtering and spectral upsampling for rendering, to improve colour accuracy in high dynamic range imaging. Our method requires a limited number of acquisitions, an off-the-shelf target and a commonly available projector, used as a controllable light source, other than the reflected radiance to be known. The characterized camera can be effectively used as a 2D tele-colorimeter, providing the user with an accurate estimate of the distribution of luminance and chromaticity in a scene, without requiring explicit knowledge of the incident lighting power spectra. We validate the approach by comparing our estimated absolute tristimulus values (XYZ data in cd/m 2 ) with the measurements of a professional 2D tele-colorimeter, for a set of scenes with complex geometry, spatially varying reflectance and light sources with very different spectral power distribution.