| Abstract: | A method is described for estimating the surface-spectral reflectances of glossy objects when the color signal is a mixture of diffuse reflections, specular reflections, and interreflections. The objects are inhomogeneous dielectric materials, and the reflected light is measured using a spectroradiometer. We first describe the main idea; the color signals, reflected from two closely apposed surfaces with a single interreflection between them, can be expressed by a linear combination of the illuminant spectrum and two diffuse spectral reflection functions. We introduce a representation in which each of these three terms is projected onto a point on a unit sphere. Estimation of the diffuse reflection functions is then reduced to finding the vertices of the spherical triangle. Next, an algorithm is described to estimate the locations of the vertices of diffuse reflectance functions from the measured samples. The reliability of the algorithm is demonstrated in an experiment using two plastic objects with glossy surfaces. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |
