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Real-Time Specular Highlight Removal Using Bilateral Filtering

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Computer Vision – ECCV 2010 (ECCV 2010)
Real-Time Specular Highlight Removal Using Bilateral Filtering
  • Qingxiong Yang19,
  • Shengnan Wang19 &
  • Narendra Ahuja19 

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 6314))

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  • European Conference on Computer Vision
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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a simple but effective specular highlight removal method using a single input image. Our method is based on a key observation - the maximum fraction of the diffuse color component (so called maximum diffuse chromaticity in the literature) in local patches in color images changes smoothly. Using this property, we can estimate the maximum diffuse chromaticity values of the specular pixels by directly applying low-pass filter to the maximum fraction of the color components of the original image, such that the maximum diffuse chromaticity values can be propagated from the diffuse pixels to the specular pixels. The diffuse color at each pixel can then be computed as a nonlinear function of the estimated maximum diffuse chromaticity. Our method can be directly extended for multi-color surfaces if edge-preserving filters (e.g., bilateral filter) are used such that the smoothing can be guided by the maximum diffuse chromaticity. But maximum diffuse chromaticity is to be estimated. We thus present an approximation and demonstrate its effectiveness. Recent development in fast bilateral filtering techniques enables our method to run over 200× faster than the state-of-the-art on a standard CPU and differentiates our method from previous work.

The source code and the tested images are available on the author’s website. The support of Hewlett-Packard under the Open-Innovation Research program is gratefully acknowledged.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinos, Urbana Champaign,  

    Qingxiong Yang, Shengnan Wang & Narendra Ahuja

Authors
  1. Qingxiong Yang
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  2. Shengnan Wang
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  3. Narendra Ahuja
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, 3330 Walnut Street, 19104, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Kostas Daniilidis

  2. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 15773, Athens, Greece

    Petros Maragos

  3. Department of Applied Mathematics, Ecole Centrale de Paris, Grande Voie des Vignes, 92295, Chatenay-Malabry, France

    Nikos Paragios

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Yang, Q., Wang, S., Ahuja, N. (2010). Real-Time Specular Highlight Removal Using Bilateral Filtering. In: Daniilidis, K., Maragos, P., Paragios, N. (eds) Computer Vision – ECCV 2010. ECCV 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6314. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15561-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15561-1_7

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