Deriving intrinsic images from image sequences

Intrinsic images are a useful midlevel description of scenes proposed by H.G. Barrow and J.M. Tenenbaum (1978). An image is de-composed into two images: a reflectance image and an illumination image. Finding such a decomposition remains a difficult problem in computer vision. We focus on a slightly, easier problem: given a sequence of T images where the reflectance is constant and the illumination changes, can we recover T illumination images and a single reflectance image? We show that this problem is still imposed and suggest approaching it as a maximum-likelihood estimation problem. Following recent work on the statistics of natural images, we use a prior that assumes that illumination images will give rise to sparse filter outputs. We show that this leads to a simple, novel algorithm for recovering reflectance images. We illustrate the algorithm's performance on real and synthetic image sequences.