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 our new deorbit tool, built specifically to reduce the artificial appearance of the white orbs. It does this by recognizing saturated regions, synthesizing credible detail for these regions, and then brightening toward the center of each region. 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

Images are displayed below at 50% screen width, but will save as full size.

Last uploaded file is:

DeOrbIt output for the above is (there may be some processing delay):

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.

Enlarge region by 2 pixels beyond edge.
Increase this to remove sharpening artifacts that were around saturated regions.

Feather orb shading by 24 pixels.
This determines how many pixels from the edge of a region saturation is allowed.

Smooth within regions by 48 pixels.
This determines how many pixels in from edge get smoothed; usually best greater than feather.

Maximum number of orbs within a region is 5 orbs.
Multiple orbs can overlap to create larger regions; larger regions are not processed.

The maximum orb diameter to be processed is 64 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.

The walk radius for random texturing of regions is 2 pixels.
Adds randomness to default texture synthesis which can help break-up orb edges.

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

The Aggregate The only thing set in stone is our name.