A Conditional Random Field for Automatic Photo Editing

Abstract

We introduce a method for fully automatic touch-up of face images by making inferences about the structure of the scene and undesirable textures in the image. A distribution over image segmentations and labelings is computed via a conditional random field; this distribution controls the application of various local image transforms to regions in the image. Parameters governing both the labeling and transforms are jointly optimized w.r.t. a training set of before-and-after example images. One major advantage of our formulation is the ability to marginalize over all possible labeling and thus exploit all the information in the distribution; this yield better results than MAP inference. We demonstrate with a system that is trained to correct red-eye, reduce specularities, and remove acne and other blemishes from faces, showing results with test images scavenged from acne-themed internet message boards.