Flash/no-flash image integration using convex optimization

When high ISO sensitivity is used to acquire images of dark scenes, their detail textures are often deteriorated by sensor noise. On the other hand, using flash photography with artificial light, one can shorten the exposure time, and obtain a sharp image under the low ISO sensitivity. However, the use of flash light changes the color tone and often generates unnatural images due to a specific color temperature of the additional light. This paper presents a new efficient method for flash/no-flash image integration. In contrast to conventional integration methods assuming that the flash image has a sharp texture without any noise, our method can successfully remove noise. Specifically, our method separately handles regions within the reach of the flash light and other regions out of range of the flash light, because the two regions have much different characteristics. As for the former well-exposed regions, we transferred the detail of the flash image to no-flash image by optimization and component separation. As for the latter under-exposed regions, an optimization based joint bilateral filtering that uses information of a flash image is performed to remove noise. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method compared to the conventional methods.