Natural color reproduction system for telemedicine and its application to digital camera

For a reliable diagnosis via visual telecommunication systems, it is very important to reproduce patient images with correct color. But it is not certain by conventional color imaging systems especially when the illumination of observing site is different from that of the image capturing site. We present a natural color reproduction system for telemedicine. In this system, the color of a patient under observing illumination is calculated from multispectral image. For accurate color reproduction, the spectral reflectance is calculated using principal components of human skin in the process. The color image is displayed on a calibrated display device. In the experiment, it is confirmed that the system realizes good accuracy in the color reproduction of human skin from 10 band multispectral image. And for simplification of the system we also adapted this process to commercial digital RGB camera.