Image Fusion for Context Enhancement

With: Ramesh Raskar and Adrian Ilie

Abstract

We present a class of image fusion techniques to automatically combine images of a scene captured under different illumination. Beyond providing digital tools for artists for creating surrealistic images and videos, the method can also be used for practical applications. For example, the non-realistic appearance can be used to enhance the context of nighttime traffic videos so that they are easier to understand. The context is automatically captured from a fixed camera and inserted from a day-time image (of the same scene). Our approach is based on gradient domain technique that preserves important local perceptual cues while avoiding traditional problems such as aliasing, ghosting and haloing. We present several results in generating surrealistic videos and in increasing the information density of low quality nighttime videos.

In Proceedings of NPAR 2004 and the paper can be found here. See also a video demo of our work.