Background compensation in computer screen photo-assisted reflectance fingerprinting

The computer screen photo-assisted technique (CSPT) is a method for the classification of colorimetric assays utilizing ordinary computer sets and web cameras as instrumentation. In CSPT measurements the web camera captures the image of the assay under the screen illumination, and typically a spurious spatial distribution of intensities is overlapped on the image. This issue is examined here, focusing on the effect of the sample and illuminating colors on the spatial modulation of intensity. A method for the selection of colors composing an illuminating sequence that minimizes the spatial variability is proposed. The approach is tested for the classification of different color substances showing improvements up to 53% of the intra/inter cluster distance ratio measured in a PCA space, when compared to randomly chosen colors.