A method to evaluate the discrimination capability of camera to measure small colour differences in the nearly neutral region (very pale and dark grayish colours) is proposed. The measurements obtained by the camera are compared with those obtained by a reference instrument (spectrophotometer). Such comparisons indicate the reliability of the camera for this colorimetric purpose. CIELAB and CIEDE2000 formulae have been used for the estimation of colour differences. The method is applied to an acquisition system composed by a 3CCD colour camera capturing under standard D65 illumination. The results for the testing set of selected Munsell matte chip pairs show that the colour differences obtained by the given camera are close to those measured by the spectrophotometer over the circle of hue.The application to real cases of colour matching in textile inspection demonstrates that the camera system is reliable enough for this task.
María S. Millán, Edison Valencia, "Camera's Performance in Measuring Small Colour Differences in the Nearly Neutral Region" in Proc. IS&T CGIV 2004 Second European Conf. on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision, 2004, pp 469 - 474, https://doi.org/10.2352/CGIV.2004.2.1.art00094