Automatic Correction of Saturated Regions in Photographs using Cross-Channel Correlation

Incorrectly setting the camera’s exposure can have a significant negative effect on a photograph. Over-exposing photographs causes pixels to exhibit unpleasant artifacts due to saturation of the sensor. Saturation removal typically involves user intervention to adjust the color values, which is tedious and time-consuming. This paper discusses how saturation can be automatically removed without compromising the essential details of the image. Our method is based on a smoothness prior: neighboring pixels have similar channel ratios and color values. We demonstrate that high quality saturation-free photos can be obtained from a simple but effective approach.