Synthesis of flash and no-flash image pairs using guided image filtering

This paper dispenses a consensus approach in digital photography to yield a better visual quality image by merging image pairs. Guided image filter is employed in this work at the acquisition level to transfers the structures and fine details of the guidance image to the filtering output along with restoration of details and fine structures in the image. The proposed synthesis approach carry out sub-band decomposition of denoised (flash and no-flash) images processed via guided filtering using 2D-DWT. The wavelet coefficients are then synthesized by using max-max decision rule. Simulations are carried out on flash/no-flash image pairs contaminated with different levels of additive Gaussian noise and are evaluated on the basis of a no-reference image quality parameter. Significant improvement in quality of the synthesized image has been perceived in comparison to original ones.