Visual Acuity in Day for Night

In film production, it is sometimes not convenient or directly impossible to shoot some night scenes at night. The film budget, schedule or location may not allow it. In these cases, the scenes are shot at daytime, and the 'night look' is achieved by placing a blue filter in front of the lens and under-exposing the film. This technique, that the American film industry has used for many decades, is called 'Day for Night' (or 'American Night' in Europe.) But the images thus obtained don't usually look realistic: they tend to be too bluish, and the objects' brightness seems unnatural for night-light. In this article we introduce a digital Day for Night algorithm that achieves very realistic results. We use a set of very simple equations, based on real physical data and visual perception experimental data. To simulate the loss of visual acuity we introduce a novel diffusion Partial Differential Equation (PDE) which takes luminance into account and r...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: IJCV
• Authors: Gloria Haro, Marcelo Bertalmío, Vicent Caselles
• Keywords: American Film Industry, IJCV 2006, Image, Night Scenes