Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Towards automatic photometric correction of casually illuminated documents

George V. Landon, Yun Lin, and W. Brent Seales. Towards automatic photometric correction of casually illuminated documents. 2007 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2007), 18-23 June 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Abstract:
Creating uniform lighting for archival-quality document acquisition remains a non-trivial problem. We propose a novel method for automatic photometric correction of non-planar documents by estimating a single, point light-source using a simple light probe. By adding a simple piece of folded white paper with a known 3D surface to a scene, we are able to extract the 3D position of a light source, automatically perform white balance correction, and determine areas of poor illumination. Furthermore, this method is designed with the purpose of adding it to an already implemented document digitization pipeline. To justify our claims, we provide an accuracy analysis of our correction technique using simulated ground-truth data which allows individual sources of error to be determined and compared. These techniques are then applied on real documents that have been acquired using a 3D scanner.
article available here