Natural color reproduction system for telemedicine

The color information of a patient image is quite important in telemedicine systems, but is not correctly reproduced by conventional color imaging systems. In this paper, we present a natural color reproduction system for telemedicine. In this system, the illumination difference between the image capturing site and observation site is corrected using a multispectral image, and the color image is displayed on a calibrated display device. For improvement of the color reproduction accuracy, the principal components of spectral reflectances are utilized in the color measurement. The accuracy of color reproduction in the developed system is experimentally evaluated. As a result, it is confirmed that the system realizes good accuracy in the color reproduction of human skin from a five band multispectral image.