Estimating physical reflectance spectra from human color-matching experiments

This article presents methods for estimating Munsell reflectance spectra, measured physically with a spectrophotometer, from psychophysically derived color-matching functions. The method is general and may also be used to estimate the reflectance spectra from human cone photoreceptor sensitivities. The color-matching functions and the cone sensitivities were found to contain almost identical information and may be considered to give equivalent estimates. The physical description of the Munsell color structure under D65 illumination was compared to the structure estimated from the human perceptual judgments. The results are virtually indistinguishable.