Radiometric calibration with illumination change for outdoor scene analysis

The images of an outdoor scene collected over time are valuable in studying the scene appearance variation which can lead to novel applications and help enhance existing methods that were constrained to controlled environments. However, the images do not reflect the true appearance of the scene in many cases due to the radiometric properties of the camera : the radiometric response function and the changing exposure. We introduce a new algorithm to compute the radiometric response function and the exposure of images given a sequence of images of a static outdoor scene where the illumination is changing. We use groups of pixels with constant behaviors towards the illumination change for the response estimation and introduce a sinusoidal lighting variation model representing the daily motion of the sun to compute the exposures.