Reference data set for camera spectral sensitivity estimation

In this article, we describe a spectral sensitivity measurement procedure at the National Physical Laboratory, London, with the aim of obtaining ground truth spectral sensitivity functions for Nikon D5100 and Sigma SD1 Merill cameras. The novelty of our data is that the potential measurement errors are estimated at each wavelength. We determine how well the measured spectral sensitivity functions represent the actual camera sensitivity functions (as a function of wavelength). The second contribution of this paper is to test the performance of various leading sensor estimation techniques implemented from the literature using measured and synthetic data and also evaluate them based on ground truth data for the two cameras. We conclude that the estimation techniques tested are not sufficiently accurate when compared with our measured ground truth data and that there remains significant scope to improve estimation algorithms for spectral estimation. To help in this endeavor, we will make all our data available online for the community.