Ambiguity-Free Radiometric Calibration for Internet Photo Collections

Radiometrically calibrating nonlinear images from Internet photo collections makes photometric analysis applicable not only to lab data but also to big image data in the wild. However, conventional calibration methods cannot be directly applied to such photo collections. This paper presents a method to jointly perform radiometric calibration for a set of nonlinear images in Internet photo collections. By incorporating the consistency of scene reflectance of corresponding pixels across nonlinear images, the proposed method first estimates radiometric response functions of all the nonlinear images up to a unique exponential ambiguity using a rank minimization framework. The ambiguity is then resolved using the linear edge color blending constraint. Quantitative evaluation using both synthetic and real-world data shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.