A new inpainting method for highlights elimination by colour morphology

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new application of the mathematical morphology: a single-image approach for the automatic detection and elimination of highlights in colour images. We use a 2D-histogram that allows us to relate the achromatic and saturation signals of a colour image and to identify interior brightness. To eliminate the highlights detected, we use an image-inpainting method, by means of connected vectorial filters of the mathematical morphology. This new filter operates exclusively on bright zones, reducing the high cost of processing the connected filters and avoiding over-simplification. The new method proposed here achieves good results, which are similar to those obtained from other multimedia techniques, yet does not require either costly multiple-view systems or stereo images.