A stereo nine-band camera for accurate color and spectrum reproduction

In the digital archiving for cultural heritage preservation, in the medical field, and in some industrial fields, high-fidelity color reproduction is very important. Multiband imaging technology is a solution for accurate color reproduction. Although several types of multiband camera systems have been developed, all of them are multi-shot systems and they cannot take images of moving objects. Tsuchida et al. [2010] have developed a one-shot stereo six-band camera system using two commercial digital cameras. This system is very reasonable in terms of cost, but the distance between the cameras causes self occlusion disparity problems when the object has 3D shape. In addition, the number of color channels of camera system should be increased for further improvement of the accuracy of estimated spectral reflectance. In this paper, we propose a stereo nine-band camera consisting of nine monochrome cameras with nine different interference filters. A nine-band image is generated from nine stereo images captured by this system. Estimated spectral reflectance and reproduced color images reproduced in experiments are shown.