Towards Spectral Estimation from a Single RGB Image in the Wild

Abstract: In contrast to the current literature, we address the problem of estimating the spectrum from a single common trichromatic RGB image obtained under unconstrained settings (e.g. unknown camera parameters, unknown scene radiance, unknown scene contents). For this we use a reference spectrum as provided by a hyperspectral image camera, and propose efficient deep learning solutions for sensitivity function estimation and spectral reconstruction from a single RGB image. We further expand the concept of spectral reconstruction such that to work for RGB images taken in the wild and propose a solution based on a convolutional network conditioned on the estimated sensitivity function. Besides the proposed solutions, we study also generic and sensitivity specialized models and discuss their limitations. We achieve state-of-the-art competitive results on the standard example-based spectral reconstruction benchmarks: ICVL, CAVE, NUS and NTIRE. Moreover, our experiments show that, for the first time, accurate spectral estimation from a single RGB image in the wild is within our reach.