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Enhancing Backlight and Spotlight Images by the Retinex-Inspired Bilateral Filter SuPeR-B

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Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1691))

Abstract

Backlight and spotlight images are pictures where the light sources generate very bright and very dark regions. The enhancement of such images has been poorly investigated and is particularly hard because it has to brighten the dark regions without over-enhance the bright ones. The solutions proposed till now generally perform multiple enhancements or segment the input image in dark and bright regions and enhance these latter with different functions. In both the cases, results are merged in a new image, that often must be smoothed to remove artifacts along the edges. This work describes SuPeR-B, a novel Retinex inspired image enhancer improving the quality of backligt and spotlight images without needing for multi-scale analysis, segmentation and smoothing. According to Retinex theory, SuPeR-B re-works the image channels separately and rescales the intensity of each pixel by a weighted average of intensities sampled from regular sub-windows. Since the rescaling factor depends both on spatial and intensity features, SuPeR-B acts like a bilateral filter. The experiments, carried out on public challenging data, demonstrate that SuPeR-B effectively improves the quality of backlight and spotlight images and also outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SuPeR-B code: https://github.com/StefanoMesselodi?tab=repositories,.

  2. 2.

    L-RESTORATION code: https://github.com/7thChord/backlit.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Digital Industry Center, 38123, Trento, Italy

    Michela Lecca

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  1. Michela Lecca
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Correspondence to Michela Lecca .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    A. Augusto de Sousa

  2. Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Vlastimil Havran

  3. Mines ParisTech, Paris, France

    Alexis Paljic

  4. Davidson College, Davidson, NC, USA

    Tabitha Peck

  5. French Civil Aviation University (ENAC), Toulouse, France

    Christophe Hurter

  6. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Helen Purchase

  7. University of Catania, Catania, Italy

    Giovanni Maria Farinella

  8. University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Petia Radeva

  9. IRISA, University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France

    Kadi Bouatouch

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Lecca, M. (2023). Enhancing Backlight and Spotlight Images by the Retinex-Inspired Bilateral Filter SuPeR-B. In: de Sousa, A.A., et al. Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications. VISIGRAPP 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1691. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25477-2_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25477-2_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-25476-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-25477-2

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