Specular highlight removal based on dichromatic reflection model and priority-based adaptive direction with light field camera

In this paper, an image restoration method with light field camera is proposed to effectively remove specular highlight, and it only needs single shot and has no special requirements for light source and environment. The x-means clustering method based on dichromatic reflection model is proposed to recover unsaturated highlight pixels, and a priority-based adaptive direction method is designed to eliminate saturated specular highlight pixels. After that, a method based on information entropy and mean gradient ratio, called EMGR, is established to quantitatively evaluate the image quality of specular highlight removal. The experimental results showed that our method can effectively utilized the multi-view advantage of the light field to remove the specular highlight of images in different scenes while completely preserving the images texture information, and has the advantages of low complexity and wide applicability.