Towards High-Quality Specular Highlight Removal by Leveraging Large-Scale Synthetic Data
It addresses the challenge of specular highlight removal for computer vision applications, with incremental improvements over previous methods.
This paper tackles the problem of removing specular highlights from single object-level images by proposing a three-stage network, achieving generalization to unseen real images and even scene-level images with complex backgrounds and lighting.
This paper aims to remove specular highlights from a single object-level image. Although previous methods have made some progresses, their performance remains somewhat limited, particularly for real images with complex specular highlights. To this end, we propose a three-stage network to address them. Specifically, given an input image, we first decompose it into the albedo, shading, and specular residue components to estimate a coarse specular-free image. Then, we further refine the coarse result to alleviate its visual artifacts such as color distortion. Finally, we adjust the tone of the refined result to match that of the input as closely as possible. In addition, to facilitate network training and quantitative evaluation, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of object-level images, covering diverse objects and illumination conditions. Extensive experiments illustrate that our network is able to generalize well to unseen real object-level images, and even produce good results for scene-level images with multiple background objects and complex lighting.