Two stage principal component analysis of color

We introduce a two-stage analysis of color spectra. In the first processing stage, correlation with the first eigenvector of a spectral database is used to measure the intensity of a color spectrum. In the second step, a perspective projection is used to map the color spectrum to the hyperspace of spectra with first eigenvector coefficient equal to unity. The location in this hyperspace describes the chromaticity of the color spectrum. In this new projection space, a second basis of eigenvectors is computed and the projected spectrum is described by the expansion in this chromaticity basis. This description is possible since the space of color spectra is conical. We compare this two-stage process with traditional principal component analysis and find that the results of the new structure are closer to the structure of traditional chromaticity descriptors than traditional principal component analysis.