Kriegman, Mallick, Zickler, and Belhumeur; CVPR 2005

In "Beyond Lambert: Reconstructing Specular Surfaces Using Color" (by Mallick, Zickler, Kriegman, and Belhumeur; CVPR 2005) pdf , a particular color space is presented: SUV. As many others it separates luminance (S) from chrominance (UV), but the most interesting part is that, by considering a dichromatic model of reflectance, they consider the reflectance as decomposed into two additive components:

- the interface (specular) reflectance
- the body (diffuse) reflectance


So getting rid of the specular reflectance one will be able to get the pure color of the objetct! That is done mapping the image into onother colorspace, where one axis(S) is perfectly alligned with the source color S. Here comes the problem: how to determine S?

In the example is presented the strength of the method, but in such case S was know a priori, which is not the case of our problem.

I tried to average 4 UV images obtained with 4 random generated source colors, but the results, as shown down here, are quite poor.