Noises removal from image sequences acquired with moving camera by estimating camera motion from spatio-temporal information

This paper describes a method for removing adherent noises from image sequences. In outdoor environments, it is often the case that scenes taken by a camera are deteriorated because of adherent noises such as waterdrops on the surface of the lens-protecting glass of the camera. To solve this problem, our method takes advantage of image sequences captured with a moving camera whose motion is unknown. Our method estimates a camera motion only from image sequences, and makes a spatio-temporal image to extract the regions of adherent noises by examining differences of track slopes in cross section images between adherent noises and other objects. Finally, regions of noises are eliminated by replacing with image data corresponding to object regions. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.