IMAGE RELIGHTING AND MATCHINGWITH ILLUMINATION INFORMATION

In recent years, interest point based feature such as SIFT and SURF are widely used for image matchings. While these features are robust to changes in scales, rotations, and local geometric deformations, they are usually less able to simul-taneously handle viewpoint changes and large illumination changes. In this paper, we will cope with this challenging problem. The basic idea is to relight one of the two images so that the image has similar illumination conditions as the other one. After relighting process, the point based features become effective again in the matching process. Our experi-ments show that the proposed method has good performance for matching two images with very different illuminations. Index Terms — image relighting, image matching 1