Spectral and Metameric Color Imaging

Spectral imaging has become a topic of growing interest in color-reproduction, remote-sensing, medicalimaging, and other systems. These increased research efforts are likely to propagate into other application areas such as computer vision and pattern recognition. This paper defines, compares, and contrasts spectral imaging and more typical metameric imaging which integrates spectral regions. The history of spectral and metameric imaging is reviewed. A public-domain research tool, Spectralizer, for spectral image manipulation, reproduction, and visualization is described. In addition, the advantages of spectral imaging over metameric imaging for object detection applications is demonstrated through simulations created using public domain spectral rendering software and real imaged objects. Finally, all of these pieces are put together in a discussion of system design issues for spectral and metameric systems. It is hoped that these freely-available research tools and systems concepts can be brought to bear on novel imaging problems by researchers in a variety of fields.