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Dark flash photography

Published:27 July 2009Publication History
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Abstract

Camera flashes produce intrusive bursts of light that disturb or dazzle. We present a prototype camera and flash that uses infra-red and ultra-violet light mostly outside the visible range to capture pictures in low-light conditions. This "dark" flash is at least two orders of magnitude dimmer than conventional flashes for a comparable exposure. Building on ideas from flash/no-flash photography, we capture a pair of images, one using the dark flash, other using the dim ambient illumination alone. We then exploit the correlations between images recorded at different wavelengths to denoise the ambient image and restore fine details to give a high quality result, even in very weak illumination. The processing techniques can also be used to denoise images captured with conventional cameras.

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References

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          cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
          ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 28, Issue 3
          August 2009
          750 pages
          ISSN:0730-0301
          EISSN:1557-7368
          DOI:10.1145/1531326
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2009 ACM

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          Publication History

          • Published: 27 July 2009
          Published in tog Volume 28, Issue 3

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