Avian Group USA has received a multiphase contract from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to design and develop reference instruments to establish a national scale for object color. According to the company, one of the instruments will provide calibrations and measurements for reflectance colorimetry under a variety of geometrical conditions, with the lowest possible uncertainty factor.

Improvements will include the use of a double-grating monochromator, which will provide sufficient stray-light rejection and wavelength accuracy for measurements of spectral reflectance, and therefore of color, to meet the target uncertainty of ΔE_ab <0.5 for all colors. Also, a goniometer will have sufficient axes of rotation to obtain any combination of incident and observation angles.