An Image Highlights Removal Method with Polarization Principle

Abstract

The existing highlight detection and removal methods usually depend on color or some geometrical information. These methods cannot be used when highlight region degrades texture details of object surface. In this paper, we propose a novel, simple and effective method to solve this problem. In our method, we utilize dark channel to automatically detect highlight region. Then, based on polarization information of highlight region, specular refection component is removed. Our experimental results and comparison with other methods show that our method can effectively remove the highlight regions of the target image, and restore image texture details on the highlight regions under natural environment.