Illumination morphing: smooth transition of luminance distributions between two images

The paper proposes a method for generating a sequence of images with smooth transition of luminance distributions from two input images with different lighting conditions. The idea of the proposed method is based on image morphing. A conventional image morphing changes object shapes between two input images. We focus on changing the illumination between two images. The proposed method uses isoluminance curves as a feature primitive. Isoluminance curves acquired from images are warped based on the correspondence of the curves between two images, and transformed luminance distributions are generated from the warped isoluminance curves. The proposed method called "illumination morphing" is able to generate smooth transition of luminance between two images, and is a promising technique for many applications requiring a scene with variety of lighting effects, such as movies, TV games, and so on.