CVPR 2023, highlight paper - Nighttime Smartphone Reflective Flare Removal Using Optical Center Symmetry Prior

In this episode we discuss Nighttime Smartphone Reflective Flare Removal Using Optical Center Symmetry Prior by Yuekun Dai, Yihang Luo, Shangchen Zhou, Chongyi Li, Chen Change Loy. The paper proposes a method to address the problem of reflective flare in photos caused by light reflecting inside lenses and creating bright spots or a "ghosting effect". Existing methods for detecting these bright spots often fail to identify reflective flares created by various types of light and may even mistakenly remove light sources in scenarios with multiple light sources. The proposed method uses an optical center symmetry prior, which suggests that the reflective flare and light source are always symmetrical around the lens's optical center. The authors also create a reflective flare removal dataset called BracketFlare using continuous bracketing to capture the reflective flare pattern. The method demonstrated effective results on both synthetic and real-world datasets.