Application of image quality metamerism to investigate gold color area in cultural property

A concept of image quality metamerism as an expansion of conventional metamerism defined in color science is introduced, and it is applied to segment similar color areas in a cultural property. The image quality metamerism can unify different image quality attributes based on an index showing the degree of image quality metamerism proposed. As a basic research step, the index is consisted of color and texture information and examined to investigate a cultural property. The property investigated is a pair of folding screen paintings that depict the thriving city of Kyoto designated as a nationally important cultural property in Japan. Gold-colored areas painted by using high granularity colorants compared with other color areas are evaluated based on the image quality metamerism index locally, then the index is visualized as a map showing the possibility of the image quality metamer to the reference pixel set in the same image. This visualization means a segmentation of areas where color is similar but texture is different. The experimental result showed that the proposedmethod was effective to show areas of gold color areas in the property.© 2013 SPIE and IS&T [DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.22.1.013029]