Single image veiling glare removal

ABSTRACT

Photographing against a bright light source is difficult since the direct light from the light source causes glare phenomenon in the lens, changing the colour balance and reducing the image contrast within the field of view. To address the effect, we introduce a glare formation model that accounts for the characters of the glare. Based on the model, we propose a single image processing method to remove the glare in the images by decomposing the image into the scene layer and the glare layer. We then adjust the brightness and the colour balance of the scene layer to eliminate the influences of the glare. In order to enhance the contrast decreased by the glare, we use a local standard deviation-based contrast enhancement algorithm to boost the details while avoiding excessive enhancement. Experimental results show that the method removes the majority of the glare and improves the local contrast effectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Glare removal
• image decomposing
• contrast enhancement

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for helping us to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Joint Fund Project of the Ministry of Education of China: [grant number 6141A02022307]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Civil Aerospace Pre-Research Program.