Weighted compression of spectral color information

Spectral color information is used nowadays in many different applications. Accurate spectral images are usually very large files, but a proper compression method can reduce needed storage space remarkably with a minimum loss of information. In this paper we introduce a principal component analysis (PCA) -based compression method of spectral color information. In this approach spectral data is weighted with a proper weight function before forming the correlation matrix and calculating the eigenvector basis. First we give a general framework for how to use weight functions in compression of relevant color information. Then we compare the weighted compression method with the traditional PCA compression method by compressing and reconstructing the Munsell data set consisting of 1269 reflectance spectra and the Pantone data set consisting of 922 reflectance spectra. Two different weight functions are proposed and tested. We show that weighting clearly improves retention of color information in the PCA-based compression process.