Investigation of light source effects on digital camera-based spectral estimation

Abstract

The influence of light sources on digital camera-based spectral estimation is explored. The CIE daylight and non-CIE daylight illuminants with different Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) are first tested comparatively, results indicate that CCT can be used to describe the performance of the CIE daylight illuminants for spectral estimation but not applicable to all types of light sources. To further investigate the mechanism of light effects on spectral estimation, several handmade special shape of Spectral Power Distribution (SPD) are tested, results show that the red component in visible spectrum is crucial for a higher spectral estimation accuracy. Finally, several feature metrics of SPD are proposed to evaluate the performance of the light sources in spectral estimation, results illustrate that the better the feature metrics the better the spectral estimation accuracy.