Optimising the illumination spectrum for tissue texture visibility

Abstract

A light-emitting diode based spectrum optimisation is proposed to enhance the visibility of the texture of biological tissue. This optimisation method is based on maximising perceptual colour differences between pairs of colour patches using images of biological tissue. This approach has two advantages. First, by weighting the importance of colour differences, the impact of glint or specular reflection is reduced automatically. Second, this optimisation method puts the priority on small colour differences which could be more useful in enhancing the visibility of tissue texture. Furthermore, a psychophysical experiment has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. To be able to generalise our conclusions, different biological tissue types are used. The results show that illumination spectra that are optimised based on human perceptual colour differences significantly improve the visibility of tissue texture compared to illuminants such as CIE D65, and white LED light.