Abstract: Our technique enhances the appearance of photographs shot in dark environments by combining a picture taken with the available light and one taken with the flash. We preserve the ambiance of the original lighting and insert the sharpness and more reliable color information from the flash image. We use the bilateral filter to decompose the two images into detail and large-scale layers. We reconstruct the image using the large scale of the available lighting and the detail of the flash. We detect and correct artifacts due to the flash shadow. Our output images provide the combined advantages of available illumination and flash photography.

Copyright ACM, 2004. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2004 (ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)), archive Volume 23 , Issue 3 (August 2004)