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Efficient road specular reflection removal based on gradient properties

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Abstract

Highlights caused by changes in sunlight throughout any given day cause failure in stereo matching, object recognition, and road segmentation. This is a serious challenge in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), because local high brightness and color discontinuities generally result in noticeable blurring of the road surface or object. This paper presents a novel strategy for removing specular reflection from highlight images by gradients distribution to optimize the diffuse image. The dark channel is introduced as a prior to initially estimate and locate the highlight. The threshold filter is then adopted to divide the high-intensity highlight and the weak highlight - the weak highlight affect neither the stereo matching nor road segmentation process. Finally, gradient properties (varying smoothness of specular and diffuse reflections) are presented to optimize the layer separation. Experimental results in speed and accuracy of road segmentation show that proposed method outperforms other techniques for separating highlights from road surfaces.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, No. 61504032)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microelectronics Center, Harbin Institute of Technology, 150000, Harbin, China

    Yao Wang, Fangfa Fu, Fengchang Lai, Weizhe Xu & Jinxiang Wang

  2. College of Mechanical and Power Engineering, China Three Gorges University, 443000, Yichang, China

    Jinjin Shi

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  1. Yao Wang
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  2. Fangfa Fu
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  3. Fengchang Lai
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  5. Jinjin Shi
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Correspondence to Jinxiang Wang.

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Wang, Y., Fu, F., Lai, F. et al. Efficient road specular reflection removal based on gradient properties. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 30615–30631 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6156-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6156-5

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