Bilateral filtering in wavelet domain for synthesis of flash and no-flash image pairs

Abstract

This paper addresses an idea to blend the quality ascribes of flash and no-flash image pairs; yielding a synthesized image, better in visual quality than the original ones. Bilateral filtering algorithm is employed in this work to subdue the effect of noise superimposed at the acquisition stage without fading of details. The proposed synthesis approach performs sub-band decomposition of denoised (flash and no-flash images processed via bilateral filter) images using wavelets followed by the synthesis of coefficients via max-max decision rule. Simulations are carried out on flash/no-flash image pairs contaminated with different levels of additive Gaussian noise and are evaluated using a no-reference image quality parameter. Significant improvement in quality of the synthesized image has been observed in comparison to original ones.