Bifurcated convolutional network for specular highlight removal

Specular highlight usually causes serious information degradation, which leads to the failure of many computer vision algorithms. We have proposed a novel bifurcated convolution neural network to tackle the problem of high reflectivity image information degradation. A two-stage process is proposed for the extraction and elimination of the specular highlight features, with the procedure starting at a coarse level and progressing towards a finer level, to ensure the generated diffuse images are less affected by visual artifacts and information distortions. A bifurcated feature selection module is designed to remove the specular highlight features, thereby enhancing the detection capability of the network. The experiments on two types of challenging datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for specular highlight detection and removal. The effectiveness of the proposed bifurcated feature selection module and the overall network is also verified.