Temporal-color space analysis of reflection

A method to analyze a sequence of color images is proposed. A series of images is examined in a four-dimensional space, which is called the temporal-color space, the axes of which are the three color axes (RGB) and one temporal axis. The significance of the temporal-color space lies in its ability to represent the change of image color with time. A conventional color space analysis yields the histogram of the colors in an image only at an instance of time. Conceptually, the two reflection components from the dichromatic reflection model, the specular reflection component and the body reflection component, form two subspaces in the temporal-color space. These two components can be extracted by principal component analysis. Using this fact, real color images are analyzed, and the two reflection components are separated successfully