New N-dimensional Basis Functions for Modeling Surface Reflectance

The N basis functions are typically chosen so that Surface reflectance functions(SRFs) and spectral power distributions (SPDs) can be accurately reconstructed from their N-dimensional vector codes. Typical rendering applications assume that the resulting mapping is an isomorphism where vector operations of addition, scalar multiplication, component-wise multiplication on the N-vectors can be used to model physical operations such as superposition of lights, light-surface interactions and inter-reflection. The vector operations do not mirror the physical. However, if the choice of basis functions is restricted to characteristic functions then the resulting map between SPDs/SRFs and N-vectors is anisomorphism that preserves the physical operations needed in rendering. This paper will show how to select optimal characteristic function bases of any dimension N (number of basis functions) and also evaluate how accurately a large set of Munsell color chips can approximated as basis functions of dimension N. Keyword : Surface reflectance, illuminant, and color constancy