minerals Article Nonlinear Mixing Characteristics of Reflectance Spectra of Typical Mineral Pigments Shuqiang Lyu 1,2, Die Meng 1,2, Miaole Hou 1,2,* , Shuai Tian 3, Chunhao Huang 1,2 and Jincheng Mao 1,2 1 School of Geomatics and Urban Spatial Informatics, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 102616, China;
[email protected] (S.L.);
[email protected] (D.M.);
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[email protected] (J.M.) 2 Beijing Key Laboratory for Architectural Heritage Fine Reconstruction & Health Monitoring, Beijing 102616, China 3 Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage, Beijing 100029, China;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +86-139-1096-1145 Abstract: Hyperspectral technology has been used to identify pigments that adhere to the surfaces of polychrome artifacts. However, the colors are often produced by the mixing of pigments, which requires that the spectral characteristics of the pigment mixtures be considered before pigment un- mixing is conducted. Therefore, we proposed an experimental approach to investigate the nonlinear degree of spectral reflectance, using several mixing models, and to evaluate their performances in the study of typical mineral pigments. First, five mineral pigments of azurite, malachite, cinnabar, orpi- ment, and calcite were selected to form five groups of samples, according to their different mass ratios. Second, a fully constrained least squares algorithm based on the linear model and three algorithms based on the nonlinear model were employed to calculate the proportion of each pigment in the mixtures. We evaluated the abundance accuracy as well as the similarity between the measured and reconstructed spectra produced by those mixing models.