Enhancing photographs with Near Infra-Red images

Near infra-red (NIR) images of natural scenes usually have better contrast and contain rich texture details that may not be perceived in visible light photographs (VIS). In this paper, we propose a novel method to enhance a photograph by using the contrast and texture information of its corresponding NIR image. More precisely, we first decompose the NIR/VIS pair into average and detail wavelet subbands. We then transfer the contrast in the average subband and transfer texture in the detail subbands. We built a special camera mount that optically aligns two consumer-grade digital cameras, one of which was modified to capture NIR. Our results exhibit higher visual quality than tone-mapped HDR images, showing that NIR imaging is useful for computational photography.