Removing reflections from photos taken through windows
It’s hard to take a photo through a window without picking up reflections of the objects behind you. To solve that problem, professional photographers sometimes wrap their camera lenses in dark cloths affixed to windows by tape or suction cups. But that’s not a terribly attractive option for a traveler using a point-and-shoot camera to capture the view from a hotel room or a seat in a train. At the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June, MIT researchers will present a new algorithm that, in a broad range of cases, can automatically remove reflections from digital photos. The algorithm exploits the fact that photos taken through windows often feature two nearly identical reflections, slightly offset from each other. “In Boston, the windows are usually double-paned windows for heat isolation during the winter,” says YiChang Shih, who completed his PhD in computer science at MIT this spring and is first author...