Tuning IR-cut Filter for Illumination-aware Spectral Reconstruction from RGB
This work addresses the problem of enhancing spectral imaging accuracy for applications like computer vision and remote sensing, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles spectral reconstruction from RGB images by tuning the IR-cut filter in existing cameras, achieving improved accuracy with a better trade-off between performance and implementation complexity, and also recovers illumination spectra using a deep learning method.
To reconstruct spectral signals from multi-channel observations, in particular trichromatic RGBs, has recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional scanning-based spectral imager. It has been proven that the reconstruction accuracy relies heavily on the spectral response of the RGB camera in use. To improve accuracy, data-driven algorithms have been proposed to retrieve the best response curves of existing RGB cameras, or even to design brand new three-channel response curves. Instead, this paper explores the filter-array based color imaging mechanism of existing RGB cameras, and proposes to design the IR-cut filter properly for improved spectral recovery, which stands out as an in-between solution with better trade-off between reconstruction accuracy and implementation complexity. We further propose a deep learning based spectral reconstruction method, which allows to recover the illumination spectrum as well. Experiment results with both synthetic and real images under daylight illumination have shown the benefits of our IR-cut filter tuning method and our illumination-aware spectral reconstruction method.