An as-short-as-possible mathematical assessment of spectrophotometric color matching

Indexed by SCOPUS Abstract - Color match prediction is one of the most important aspects to be considered by industries dealing with colorants. A number of approaches have been proposed so far for helping the colorists in achieving an exact color match. The present paper describes, into a mathematical form, three widely known techniques adopted in the scientific literature for evaluating the spectrophotometric color match prediction of a target shade: Kubelka-Munch, Stearns-Noechel and Artificial Neural Networks. By reviewing such well established approaches, the authors define and provide a series of equations that may be straightforwardly used for color matching. The range of application, the limits and the reliability of the obtainable results are also provided, in order to guide the users to a correct use of such defined equations.