Source color error analysis for robust separation of reflection components

In this paper, we address the problem of separating the diffuse and specular reflection components of complex textured surfaces from a single color image. Unlike most previous approaches that assume accurate knowledge of illumination source color for this task, we analyze errors in source color information to perform robust separation. The analysis leads to a simple, efficient and robust algorithm to estimate the diffuse and specular components using the estimated source color. The algorithm is completely automatic and does not need explicit color segmentation or color boundary detection as required by many existing methods. Results on complex textured images show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for robust reflection component separation.