Digital photography with flash and no-flash image pairs

Digital photography with flash and no-flash image pairs
Georg Petschnigg, Maneesh Agrawala, Hugues Hoppe. Richard Szeliski, Michael Cohen, Kentaro Toyama.
ACM Trans. Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 23(3), 2004.
Combining detail of a flash image with ambient lighting of a non-flash image.
Abstract: Digital photography has made it possible to quickly and easily take a pair of images of low-light environments: one with flash to capture detail and one without flash to capture ambient illumination. We present a variety of applications that analyze and combine the strengths of such flash/no-flash image pairs. Our applications include denoising and detail transfer (to merge the ambient qualities of the no-flash image with the high-frequency flash detail), white-balancing (to change the color tone of the ambient image), continuous flash (to interactively adjust flash intensity), and red-eye removal (to repair artifacts in the flash image). We demonstrate how these applications can synthesize new images that are of higher quality than either of the originals.
Hindsights:

Equation (9) in the paper has a typo; it should be “Cp = Ap / Δp”.

I really like the image deblurring work of Yuan et al 2007 which uses a blurred/noisy image pair.

See also my earlier work on Continuous Flash (demo).

Additional results:
  • Detail transfer / joint bilateral filtering - view crops, view full-resolution TIFFs (203 MB)
    The crops can be viewed in the browser. The full-resolution images require a separate viewer.
    Note that the cropped images are JPEG compressed and may contain small blocking artifacts. The full-resolution images are uncompressed, but therefore rather large. Some of these images may require gamma adjustments to your monitor to see the noise. Images tagged with "bilateral" were computed using a basic bilateral filter.
  • White-balancing - view images
  • Continuous flash - view images, view video (Microsoft MPEG4 AVI, no sound)
  • Red-eye - view images