Reconstructing spectral reflectance by dividing spectral space and extending the principal components in principal component analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is widely used to reconstruct the spectral reflectance of surface colors. However, the estimated spectral accuracy is low when using only one set of three principal components for three-channel color-acquisition devices. In this study, the spectral space was first divided into 11 subgroups, and the principal components were calculated for individual subgroups. Then the principal components were further extended from three to nine through the residual spectral error of the reflectance in each subgroup. For each target sample, the extended principal components of the corresponding subgroup samples were used in the common PCA method to reconstruct the spectral reflectance. The results show that this proposed method is quite accurate and outperforms other related methods.