Measuring Image Blooming using Blurriness Metrics

Having areas in an image or a video frame with abnormally high light intensity such as including the sun in the frame is oftentimes unwanted. This artefact, however, is sometimes artificially included in an image. Blooming is the computer graphic artefact deployed on bright areas of an image to provide the illusion of extremely bright light. This artefact is often used in cinema post-processing, computer-generated imagery, and video games to produce attraction and real-world sense in the image. Nevertheless, too much blooming is always unwanted. Because of the leakage of light from these abnormally bright areas to neighboring image regions, the edges in these regions get partly faded. Therefore, it is important to measure the amount of blooming in an image or a video stream. In this paper, we propose a method to detect and measure the amount of blooming in an image or a video frame. This technique is based on measuring the sharpness (or conversely, the blurriness) of an image along the edges. The experiments show that the proposed metric can evaluate variations of blooming artifact in an image. Therefore, this measure could be used as an image quality metric.