Foreign Light Detection in Two-Camera Image Fusion
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Solution Overview
Problem
In multi-camera image capture devices, mismatched foreign light effects such as lens flare can result in unnatural-looking images when fusing images from different camera units, leading to artifacts like jaggy flare borders, loss of image detail, and skewed coloration due to differences in lens design, sensor, and position.
Innovation Solution
A detection scheme is implemented to identify mismatched foreign light regions in a uniform manner, allowing for their mitigation or exclusion during image fusion, ensuring a natural-looking foreign light pattern in the fused image by using a programmable control device to determine mask regions and apply fusion confidence maps.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If images from multiple camera units are fused directly, then image quality and detail are improved, but unnatural artifacts and skewed coloration occur due to mismatched foreign light effects
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by detecting foreign light regions in each image before the fusion process occurs. The system identifies and masks foreign light effects in advance, then proceeds with fusion using these pre-processed images, preventing artifact formation rather than correcting it afterward
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts and removes foreign light regions from images before fusion by creating masks that isolate these harmful elements. The masked regions are then excluded from the fusion process, allowing only clean image data to be combined while eliminating the source of unnatural artifacts
2Volume of moving object
If camera units with different lens designs and positions are used to achieve zoom functionality, then device compactness is improved, but mismatched foreign light patterns occur between images
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by treating foreign light regions differently from the rest of the image data. Instead of applying uniform processing to the entire image, the system identifies specific local regions affected by foreign light and applies targeted masking only to those areas, preserving the natural appearance of legitimate image content while removing unwanted effects
3Shape
If multiple short-exposed images are captured and fused, then motion blur is reduced, but noise and darkness increase in the captured images
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies partial action by selectively fusing only the non-foreign-light portions of multiple images. Rather than attempting to fuse entire images including noisy and dark foreign light regions, the system performs fusion on a pixel-by-pixel basis, excluding masked regions from the averaging process and thereby reducing noise amplification while maintaining motion clarity in valid image areas
Data Source
AI summary
Foreign lighting effects, such as lens flare, are very common in natural images. In a two-camera-system, the two images may be fused together to generate one image of a better quality. However, there are frequently different foreign light patterns in the two images that form the image pair, e.g., due to the difference in lens design, sensor and position, etc. Directly fusing such pairs of images will result in non-photorealistic images, with composed foreign light patterns from both images from the image pair. This disclosure describes a general foreign light mitigation scheme to detect all kinds of foreign light region mismatches. The detected foreign light mismatch regions may be deemphasized or excluded in the fusion step, in order to create a fused image that keeps a natural-looking foreign light pattern that is close to what was seen by the user of an image capture device during an image capture preview mode.