Specular highlight removal using reflection component separation and joint bilateral filtering

Abstract

We provide a novel specular highlight removal method using reflection component separation and joint bilateral filtering. In general, highlights in images can be represented as the linear combination of diffuse and specular reflection components in homogeneous objects. Although diffuse and specular components are well classified by the reflection component separation, some illumination effects still remain in diffuse images due to the inaccurate illumination chromaticity estimation, camera sensor noise, etc. Thus, we refine the separated diffuse component using a joint bilateral filter. We test our method on both synthetic and real images and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art ones for highlight removal. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.