• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.9
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• pp.127-135
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• 2013

In order to acquire images in low-light environments, it is usually necessary to adopt long exposure times or resort to flash lights. However, flashes often induce color distortion, cause the red-eye effect and can be disturbing to subjects. On the other hand, long-exposure shots are susceptible to subject-motion, as well as motion-blur due to camera shake when performed hand-held. A recently introduced technique to overcome the limitations of traditional low-light photography is that of multi-spectral flash. Multi-spectral flash images are a combination of UV/IR and visible spectrum information. The general idea is that of retrieving details from the UV/IR spectrum and color from the visible spectrum. However, multi-spectral flash images themselves are subject to color distortion and noise. This works presents a method to compute multi-spectral flash images so that noise can be reduced and color accuracy improved. The proposed approach is a previously seen optimization method, improved by the introduction of a weight map used to discriminate uniform regions from detail regions. The weight map is generated by applying canny edge operator and it is applied to the optimization process for discriminating the weights in uniform region and edge. Accordingly, the weight of color information is increased in the uniform region and the detail region of weight is decreased in detail region. Therefore, the proposed method can be enhancing color reproduction and removing artifacts. The performance of the proposed method has been objectively evaluated using long-exposure shots as reference.