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Natural colors — reflectance spectra metamers

April 19, 2022 JimK Leave a Comment

In preparation for some work that I’ll be doing about observer metameric errors in digital cameras, I’ve built a program that, given a target color and a set of sample reflectance spectra, will:

  1. Using principal component analysis, find a set of basis functions for the sample set
  2. Assuming the set is lit with a particular illuminant (I used D50 for the data I’m presenting here), find as many spectra as you specify by combining the basis functions.
  3. All of the spectra will resolve to the same color for a CIE 1931 2-degre observer. They are therefore metamers.
  4. I set the boundary conditions to exclude spectra with over 100% or less than 0%  reflectance.

Some examples using 6 basis functions plus a flat-spectrum one, starting with a neutral gray:

A yellow-orange:

A blue:

A red:

A blueish green:

A red with a shift in the magenta direction:

 

A magenta:

 

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