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Abstract

When photographing through a piece of glass, reflections usually degrade the quality of captured images or videos. In this paper, by exploiting periodically varying light flickering, we investigate the problem of removing strong reflections from contaminated image sequences or videos with a unified capturing setup. We propose a learning-based method that utilizes short-term and long-term observations of mixture videos to exploit one-side contextual clues in fluctuant components and brightness-consistent clues in consistent components for achieving layer separation and flickering removal, respectively. A dataset containing synthetic and real mixture videos with light flickering is built for network training and testing. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by the comprehensive evaluation on synthetic and real data, the application for video flickering removal, and the exploratory experiment on high-speed scenes.

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Data availability

Datasets used in this study are available from co-first authors on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. In this paper, when a method is not explicitly named, we adopt the convention of using “the initials of the surnames of the first two authors + year” as synonyms of it.

  2. Since the cycle of \(\sin (2\pi i+\epsilon )\) is 1, when \(f=100\) and \(\tau =1/30\), the cycle of \(\sin (20/3\pi i+\epsilon )\) becomes 3.

  3. https://www.edmundoptics.com/p/CM3-U3-50S5C-CS-2-3inch-Chameleon3-Color-Camera/37032.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Science and Technology Major Project (Grant No. 2021ZD0109803), National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 62301009, 62088102, and 62136001.

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Correspondence to Boxin Shi.

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Communicated by Rynson W. H. Lau.

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Hong, Y., Chang, Y., Liang, J. et al. Light Flickering Guided Reflection Removal. Int J Comput Vis (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-024-02073-z

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