What Can Be Known about the Radiometric Response from Images?

Abstract. Brightness values of pixels in an image are related to image irradiance by a non-linear function, called the radiometric response function. Recovery of this function is important since many algorithms in computer vision and image processing use image irradiance. Several investigators have described methods for recovery of the radiometric response, without using charts, from multiple exposures of the same scene. All these recovery methods are based solely on the correspondence of gray-levels in one exposure to gray-levels in another exposure. This correspondence can be described by a function we call the brightness transfer function. We show that brightness transfer functions, and thus images themselves, do not uniquely determine the radiometric response function, nor the ratios of exposure between the images. We completely determine the ambiguity associated with the recovery of the response function and the exposure ratios. We show that all previous methods break these ambigu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ECCV
• Authors: Michael D. Grossberg, Shree K. Nayar
• Keywords: Brightness Histograms, Brightness Image, Brightness Transfer Function, Brightness Transfer Functions, Computer Vision, ECCV 2002, Radiometric Response Function