It is often the case that multiplications of whole spectra, component by component, must be carried out, for example when light reflects from or is transmitted through materials. This leads to particularly taxing calculations, especially in spectrally based ray tracing or radiosity in graphics, making a full-spectrum method prohibitively expensive. Nevertheless, using full spectra is attractive because of the many important phenomena that can be modeled only by using all the physics at hand. We apply to the task of spectral multiplication a method previously used in modeling RGB-based light propagation. We show that we can often multiply spectra without carrying out spectral multiplication. In previous work [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 11, 1553 (1994)] we developed a method called spectral sharpening, which took camera RGBs to a special sharp basis that was designed to render illuminant change simple to model. Specifically, in the new basis, one can effectively model illuminant change by using a diagonal matrix rather than the 3×3 linear transform that results from a three-component finite-dimensional model [G. Healey and D. Slater, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 11, 3003 (1994)]. We apply this idea of sharpening to the set of principal components vectors derived from a representative set of spectra that might reasonably be encountered in a given application. With respect to the sharp spectral basis, we show that spectral multiplications can be modeled as the multiplication of the basis coefficients. These new product coefficients applied to the sharp basis serve to accurately reconstruct the spectral product. Although the method is quite general, we show how to use spectral modeling by taking advantage of metameric surfaces, ones that match under one light but not another, for tasks such as volume rendering. The use of metamers allows a user to pick out or merge different volume structures in real time simply by changing the lighting.

© 2003 Optical Society of America

[Optical Society of America ]

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Citation lists with outbound citation links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Article level metrics are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

Related Journal Articles

• Analyzing the spectral dimensionality of outdoor visible and near-infrared illumination functions (JOSAA)
• Color line search for illuminant estimation in real-world scenes (JOSAA)
• Color invariant for daylight changes: relaxing the constraints on illuminants (JOSAA)
• Spectral invariance under daylight illumination changes (JOSAA)
• Emergency Illumination Panel that Displays Different Pictures Depending on Room Brightness (AO)

Related Conference Papers

• Liquid crystal displays backlit with LEDs
• Optimization of Parameterized Lightpipes
• Equiangular-Spiral Non-Loss Bent Lightpipe and Its Applications
• White Light Emissions from Complex Core-Shell Nanoparticles
• OSA Rochester Section Optics Suitcase: a forty-minute middle school outreach program for the cost of a postage stamp