Digital photography with flash and no-flash image pairs

Abstract

Digital photography has made it possible to quickly and easily take a pair of images of low-light environments: one with flash to capture detail and one without flash to capture ambient illumination. We present a variety of applications that analyze and combine the strengths of such flash/no-flash image pairs. Our applications include denoising and detail transfer (to merge the ambient qualities of the no-flash image with the high-frequency flash detail), white-balancing (to change the color tone of the ambient image), continuous flash (to interactively adjust flash intensity), and red-eye removal (to repair artifacts in the flash image). We demonstrate how these applications can synthesize new images that are of higher quality than either of the originals.