EFFICIENCY COMPARISON OF ANALYTICAL GAUSSIAN AND LINEAR SPECTRAL MODELS IN THE SAME COLOUR CONSTANCY FRAMEWORK

The present work demonstrates for the first time the advantage of an analytical Gaussian model of spectral function approximation for solving the colour constancy problem. This model was compared with well-known linear models in numerical simulations performed over an extensive set of natural pigments illuminated by both ideal Planck and real light sources. The precision and stability of the colour constancy were estimated using the same colour constancy algorithm for all the models compared. The experiments indicate that the Gaussian model is potentially more effective for estimating the chromaticity of the scene illuminant and the scene objects than the linear spectral models are. In addition, the Gaussian model involves the possibility of comparing the object colour with the etalon colour captured by another sensor.