DeOrbIt: synthesize replacements for Fuji-like white orbs

Various digital cameras suffer to some extent from sensor blooming. This problem results in pixels near a seriously overexposed pixel also becoming saturated. Sensors vary dramatically in how much leakage there is between pixels. The processing of the raw sensor data can contribute to the severity of this problem. For example, when a color channel is saturated, it is common that the interpolation process will spread saturation to white rather than corrupt the color. Less-than-subtle sharpening can cause dark outlines around the saturated areas. The worst-case result is something like the infamous white orbs too commonly found in images taken with the Fujifilm X10.

This WWW tool, available from http://aggregate.org/DIT/DEORBIT/, is a test interface to the 240313 version of our deorbit tool, built specifically to reduce the artificial appearance of the white orbs. It does this by recognizing orbs in saturated regions, synthesizing credible detail for these regions, and then brightening toward the centers. The tool will be released as public domain full C source code, but is made available here now to collect more test cases for improving it. Any images submitted here will be logged and may be used as test cases for improving the program further before release of the stand-alone version. To prevent use of this site for file-sharing, images submitted will be be made inaccessible shortly after they are submitted... so do any parameter tweaking (using the sliders below) soon after submitting an image.

Image Submission

Submit an image to de-orb:

Optional: If you are the owner of the rights to the above image and might be willing to allow the image to be used in research publications as an example case for DeOrbIt, enter your email address below. Your email address will only be used to confirm this permission and no images will be redistributed without first confirming permission via email.

Image Display

Before and after images are displayed below to fit in screen width, but will save as full size:

Optional:: You can grade the image quality of the reprocessed image above, which may help us improve the tool. Grades range from 0 to 100%. Your rating of the processed image quality is no grade assigned.

Processing Parameters

The deorbit processing parameters can be changed below. They are initialized to the values used to produce the image above. Note that it may be desirable to let deorbit be overly aggressive about processing regions and then selectively combine this output with the original by overlaying it in gimp, photoshop, etc., and manually erasing the portions that were too aggressively processed. The selection below facilitates even more aggressive tuning in your favorite image editor by giving access to the synthesized fill and relighting as separate images.

Enlarge region by 1 pixels beyond threshold edge.
Increase this to remove sharpening artifacts that were around saturated regions.
Decrease this if the processing seems to have blurred too much around saturated areas.

Feather orb edges by 2 pixels beyond region edge.
This determines how many pixels past a region edge are used for blending.

Smooth within regions using up to 2 passes.
This determines how many smoothing passes are made over regions.

The maximum orb diameter to be processed is 128 pixels.
Sets the largest diameter that will be considered an orb; larger are not processed.

The exponent (power) for the region shading is 1.
Used to change sharpness of tonal transition to saturation: higher is sharper.
The default 1.0 produces spherical shading, but some scenes look better around 2.0.

The window radius for smoothing and texturing of regions is 3 pixels.
A larger window radius yields smoother shading transitions.

The threshold for treatment as saturated pixels is 97%.
Adjusts the threshold for the minimum brightness to be considered part of an orb.

The C program that generated this page was written by Hank Dietz using the CGIC library to implement the CGI interface.

The only thing set in stone is our name.