Laure FAUCH^*, Victor TEPLOV, Ervin NIPPOLAINEN, and Alexei A. KAMSHILIN

Department of Physics, University of Kuopio, P.O. Box 1627, FIN-70211 Kuopio, Finland

(Received August 31, 2008; Revised March 13, 2009; Accepted March 24, 2009)

We analyze a recently proposed technique for fast acquisition of the two-dimensional (2D) spatial distribution of reflectance spectra to figure out how much its ability of distinguishing almost similar spectra declines with increase of the spectral line bandwidth of the light source. This analysis was carried out using the experimentally measured reflectance spectra of four metameric samples and simulating the system response to an illumination by spectral lines with variable bandwidth. It was shown that the metameric samples are distinguishable even when the bandwidth of illuminating lines is 20–30 nm. A wider bandwidth allows implementation of simultaneous illumination of an object that leads to a diminution of the acquisition time of 2D-multispectral images due to both faster operation in the parallel mode of Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) switching and higher output power.

Key words: multispectral imaging, light source, reflectance spectrum, principal component analysis, data acquisition

^*E-mail address: laure.fauch@uku.fi