Specular Highlight Removal for Real-world Images

摘要

Removing specular highlight in an image is a fundamental research problem in computer vision and computer graphics. While various methods have been proposed, they typically do not work well for real-world images due to the presence of rich textures, complex materials, hard shadows, occlusions and color illumination, etc. In this paper, we present a novel specular highlight removal method for real-world images. Our approach is based on two observations of the real-world images: (i) the specular highlight is often small in size and sparse in distribution; (ii) the remaining diffuse image can be represented by linear combination of a small number of basis colors with the sparse encoding coefficients. Based on the two observations, we design an optimization framework for simultaneously estimating the diffuse and specular highlight images from a single image. Specifically, we recover the diffuse components of those regions with specular highlight by encouraging the encoding coefficients sparseness using L-0 norm. Moreover, the encoding coefficients and specular highlight are also subject to the non-negativity according to the additive color mixing theory and the illumination definition, respectively. Extensive experiments have been performed on a variety of images to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority over the previous methods.