The discrete cosine maximum ignorance assumption

The performance of colour correction algorithms are dependent on the reflectance sets used. Sometimes, when the testing reflectance set is changed the ranking of colour correction algorithms also changes. To remove dependence on dataset we can make assumptions about the set of all possible reflectances. In the Maximum Ignorance with Positivity (MIP) assumption we assume that all reflectances with per wavelength values between 0 and 1 are equally likely. A weakness in the MIP is that it fails to take into account the correlation of reflectance functions between wavelengths (many of the assumed reflectances are, in reality, not possible). In this paper, we take the view that the maximum ignorance assumption has merit but, hitherto it has been calculated with respect to the wrong coordinate basis. Here, we propose the Discrete Cosine Maximum Ignorance assumption (DCMI), where all reflectances that have coordinates between max and min bounds in the Discrete Cosine Basis coordinate system are equally likely. Here, the correlation between wavelengths is encoded and this results in the set of all plausible reflectances’looking like’ typical reflectances that occur in nature. This said the DCMI model is also a superset of all measured reflectance sets. Experiments show that, in colour correction, adopting the DCMI results in similar colour correction performance as using a particular reflectance set.