Toward Real Flare Removal: A Comprehensive Pipeline and A New Benchmark
Zheyan Jin Shiqi Chen Huajun Feng Zhihai Xu Yueting Chen
Photographing in the under-illuminated scenes, the presence of complex light
sources often leave strong flare artifacts in images, where the intensity, the
spectrum, the reflection, and the aberration altogether contribute the
deterioration. Besides the image quality, it also influence the performance of
down-stream visual applications. Thus, removing the lens flare and ghosts is a
challenge issue especially in low-light environment. However, existing methods
for flare removal mainly restricted to the problems of inadequate simulation
and real-world capture, where the categories of scattered flares are singular
and the reflected ghosts are unavailable. Therefore, a comprehensive
deterioration procedure is crucial for constructing the dataset of flare
removal. Based on the theoretical analysis and real-world evaluation, we
propose a well-developed methodology for generating the data-pairs with flare
deterioration. The procedure is comprehensive, where the similarity of
scattered flares and the symmetric effect of reflected ghosts are realized.
Moreover, we also construct a real-shot pipeline that respectively processes
the effects of scattering and reflective flares, aiming to directly generate
the data for end-to-end methods. Experimental results show that the proposed
methodology add diversity to the existing flare datasets and construct a
comprehensive mapping procedure for flare data pairs. And our method facilities
the data-driven model to realize better restoration in flare images and
proposes a better evaluation system based on real shots, resulting promote
progress in the area of real flare removal.