Introduction

Near Infra-Red (NIR) images of natural scenes usually have better contrast and contain rich texture details that may not be perceived in visible light photographs (VIS). We propose a novel method to enhance a photograph by using the contrast and texture information of its corresponding NIR image. More precisely, we first decompose the NIR/VIS pair into average and detail wavelet subbands. We then transfer the contrast in the average subband and transfer texture in the detail subbands. We built a special camera mount that optically aligns two consumergrade digital cameras, one of which was modified to capture NIR.Our results exhibit higher visual quality than tonemapped HDR images, showing that NIR imaging is useful for computational photography.

Workflow

More Examples

A set of examples taken in Anchorage, Alaska.
VIS	NIR	Mask	Enhanced Result

Publication

X.P. Zhang, T. Sim, X.P. Miao, "Enhancing Photographs with Near Infrared Images", IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2008, Ankorage, US. [PDF 18M]