Spectral Sensitivity Estimation with an Uncalibrated Diffraction Grating

Lilika Makabe, Hiroaki Santo, Fumio Okura, Michael S. Brown, Yasuyuki Matsushita; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 27252-27261

This paper introduces a practical and accurate calibration method for camera spectral sensitivity using a diffraction grating. Accurate calibration of camera spectral sensitivity is crucial for various computer vision tasks, including color correction, illumination estimation, and material analysis. Unlike existing approaches that require specialized narrow-band filters or reference targets with known spectral reflectances, our method only requires an uncalibrated diffraction grating sheet, readily available off-the-shelf. By capturing images of the direct illumination and its diffracted pattern through the grating sheet, our method estimates both the camera spectral sensitivity and the diffraction grating parameters in a closed-form manner. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional reference target-based methods, underscoring its effectiveness and practicality.