A Survey of Specularity Removal Methods

The separation of reflection components is an important issue in computer graphics, computer vision and image processing. It provides useful information for the applications that need consistent object surface appearance, such as stereo reconstruction, visual recognition, tracking, objects re-illumination and dichromatic editing. In this paper we will present a brief survey of recent advances in separation of reflection components, also known as specularity (highlights) removal. Several techniques that try to tackle the problem from different points of view have been proposed so far. In this survey, we will overview these methods and we will present a critical analysis of their benefits and drawbacks.