Premium
8.1: Invited Paper : Enhancing the Visible with the Invisible: Exploiting Near Infrared to Advance Computational Photography and Computer Vision
Author(s) -
Süsstrunk Sabine,
Fredembach Cleément
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
sid symposium digest of technical papers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.351
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 2168-0159
pISSN - 0097-966X
DOI - 10.1889/1.3500628
Subject(s) - photography , standard illuminant , computer vision , computer science , artificial intelligence , shadow (psychology) , wavelength , computational photography , optics , smoothing , infrared , digital camera , near infrared spectroscopy , visible spectrum , filter (signal processing) , digital photography , physics , image processing , image (mathematics) , psychology , visual arts , psychotherapist , art
Siliconbased digital camera sensors exhibit significant sensitivity beyond the visible spectrum 400–700nm. They are able to capture wavelengths up to 1100 nm, i.e., they are sensitive to nearinfrared NIR radiation. This additional information is conventionally treated as noise and is absorbed by a NIR blocking filter affixed to the sensor. We show that retaining instead of removing NIR information can significantly improve certain computational photography and computer vision tasks. Indeed, intrinsic properties of the NIR wavelength band guarantee that images can be sharper, less affected by manmade colorants, and more resilient to changing light conditions. The benefits of using NIR images in conjunction with standard color images in applications such as haze removal, skin smoothing, single and multiple illuminant detection, shadow detection, and material classification is discussed.