A Multi-Task Network for Joint Specular Highlight Detection and Removal

Specular highlight detection and removal are fundamental and challenging tasks. Although recent methods have achieved promising results on the two tasks by training on synthetic training data in a supervised manner, they are typically solely designed for highlight detection or removal, and their performance usually deteriorates significantly on real-world images. In this paper, we present a novel network that aims to detect and remove highlights from natural images. To remove the domain gap between synthetic training samples and real test images, and support the investigation of learning-based approaches, we first introduce a dataset with about 16K real images, each of which has the corresponding ground truths of highlight detection and removal. Using the presented dataset, we develop a multi-task network for joint highlight detection and removal, based on a new specular highlight image formation model. Experiments on the benchmark datasets and our new dataset show that our approach clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for both highlight detection and removal.