Highlight substitution in light fields

Highlights occur especially when recording medical (color) images during micro-invasive operations. They disturb the physicians who can sometimes only guess the tissue at the position of the highlights. We present a new technique of highlight removal. A so-called light field is generated from the recorded image sequence. Then a binary highlight mask is computed for each image and used as confidence map for the light field pixels. The result is a light field in which pixels at highlight positions are interpolated by pixels which were not over-imposed by highlights. This leads to light fields with better images. We demonstrate and evaluate the technique on medical and synthetic image sequences.