However, any progress made here would have direct implications for research into the colour constancy problem. While progress has been made into surface colour estimation, the recovered estimates are coarse approximations of the true colour. Moreover, obtaining these estimates takes considerable time. Glenn Healey's group at UC Irvine is the leader in research in this field. Importantly the simpler invariants have been shown to capture more useful information.
Work needs to be done on constructing invariants for all likely viewing conditions.
The challenge for computer vision is to exploit this relationship in designing algorithms for shape recovery and reflectance estimation. Taking the theory into practice is the key research that needs to be carried out in this area. The surface gamut constraint states that the range of colours that a camera measures depends on the colour of the light and the illuminant gamut constraint states that the range in the colour of lights is limited.