Perceptual Color Characterization of Cameras

Javier Vazquez-Corral, David Connah, Marcelo Bertalmío

Abstract:

Color camera characterization, mapping outputs from the camera sensors to
an independent color space such as XY Z, is an important step in the camera processing
pipeline. Until now, this procedure has been primarily solved by using a 3 × 3 matrix
obtained via a least-squares optimization. In this paper we propose to use the spherical
sampling method, recently published by Finlayson et al., to perform a perceptual color
characterization. In particular, we search for the 3 × 3 matrix that minimizes three different
perceptual errors, one pixel-based, and two spatial-based. For the pixel-based case, we
minimize the CIE Delta E error, while for the spatial-based case we minimize both the
SCIELAB error and the CID error measure. Our results demonstrate an improvement of
approximately 3% for the Delta E error, 7% for the SCIELAB error and 13% for the CID
error measures.