Abstract

Digital photography has made it possible to quickly and easily take a pair of images of low-light environments: one with flash to capture detail and one without flash to capture ambient illumination. We present a variety of applications that analyze and combine the strengths of such flash/no-flash image pairs. Our applications include denoising and detail transfer (to merge the ambient qualities of the no-flash image with the high-frequency flash detail), white-balancing (to change the color tone of the ambient image), continuous flash (to interactively adjust flash intensity), and red-eye removal (to repair artifacts in the flash image). We demonstrate how these applications can synthesize new images that are of higher quality than either of the originals.

Citation
Georg Petschnigg, Maneesh Agrawala, Hugues Hoppe, Richard Szeliski, Michael Cohen, Kentaro Toyama. Digital Photography with Flash and No-Flash Image Pairs. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2004), 2004.
Link to the Paper LOW (3.4MB) | High (21.1MB)

Interesting that they use a combined flash and no flash image to come to a balance.

SOURCE