A NURBS-based spectral reflectance descriptor with applications in computer vision and pattern recognition

In this paper, we present a surface reflectance descriptor based on the control points resulting from the interpolation of non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) curves to multispectral reflectance data. The interpolation is based upon a knot removal scheme in the parameter domain. Thus, we exploit the local support of NURBS so as to recover a compact descriptor robust to noise and local perturbation of the spectra. We demonstrate the utility of our NURBS-based descriptor for material identification. To this end, we perform skin spectra recognition making use of a support vector machine classifier. We also provide results on hyperspectral imagery and elaborate on the preprocessing step for skin segmentation. We compare our results with those obtained using an alternative descriptor.