Light Pollution Reduction in Nighttime Photography
This addresses a specific issue for nighttime photographers by providing a method to reduce light pollution in images, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing inverse estimation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of light pollution degrading nighttime photography by developing a physically-based algorithm that estimates and removes artificial light effects, restoring image quality.
Nighttime photographers are often troubled by light pollution of unwanted artificial lights. Artificial lights, after scattered by aerosols in the atmosphere, can inundate the starlight and degrade the quality of nighttime images, by reducing contrast and dynamic range and causing hazes. In this paper we develop a physically-based light pollution reduction (LPR) algorithm that can substantially alleviate the aforementioned degradations of perceptual quality and restore the pristine state of night sky. The key to the success of the proposed LPR algorithm is an inverse method to estimate the spatial radiance distribution and spectral signature of ground artificial lights. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate the efficacy and limitations of the LPR algorithm.