Simultaneous Surface Reflectance and Fluorescence Spectra Estimation

There is widespread interest in estimating the fluorescence properties of natural materials in an image. However, the separation between reflected and fluoresced components is difficult, because it is impossible to distinguish reflected and fluoresced photons without controlling the illuminant spectrum. We show how to jointly estimate the reflectance and fluorescence from a single set of images acquired under multiple illuminants. We present a framework based on a linear approximation to the physical equations describing image formation in terms of surface spectral reflectance and fluorescence due to multiple fluorophores. We relax the non-convex, inverse estimation problem in order to jointly estimate the reflectance and fluorescence properties in a single optimization step. We provide a software implementation of the solver for our method and prior methods. We evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the method using both simulations and experimental data. To evaluate the methods experimentally we built a custom imaging system using a monochrome camera, a filter wheel with bandpass transmissive filters and a small number of light emitting diodes. We compared the methods based upon our framework with the ground truth as well as with prior methods.