Radial Bright Channel Prior for Single Image Vignetting Correction

This paper presents a novel prior, radial bright channel (RBC) prior, for single image vignetting correction. The RBC prior is derived from a statistical property of vignetting-free images: for the pixels sharing the same radius in polar coordinates of an image, at least one pixel has a high intensity value at some color channel. Exploiting the prior, we can effectively estimate and correct the vignetting effect of a given image. We represent the vignetting effect as an 1D function of the distance from the optical center, and estimate the function using the RBC prior. As it works completely in 1D, our method provides high efficiency in terms of computation and storage costs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method runs an order of magnitude faster than previous work, while producing higher quality results of vignetting correction.