Controlling illumination color to enhance object discriminability

The authors describe how to design color illumination to improve the discriminability of objects in color images. This procedure is useful in applications where the illumination can be controlled, such as inspection tasks. From the physics of color image formation, the optimal color illumination for discriminating materials is derived using a parametrically defined set of illuminants. The authors suggest how such an approach might be extended to sets of materials and more general classes of light sources. Experiments with painted color patches and live potato plantlets are used to illustrate the usefulness of actively controlling illumination color in machine vision