Automatic redeye removal for smart enhancement of photos of unknown origin

The paper describes a modular procedure for automatic correction of redeye artifact in images of unknown origin, maintaining the natural appearance of the eye. First, a smart color balancing procedure is applied. This phase not only facilitates the subsequent steps of processing, but also improves the overall appearance of the output image. Combining the results of a color-based face detector and of a face detector based on a multi-resolution neural network the most likely facial regions are identified. Redeye is searched for only within these regions, seeking areas with high "redness" satisfying some geometric constraints. A novel redeye removal algorithm is then applied automatically to the red eyes identified, and opportunely smoothed to avoid unnatural transitions between the corrected and original parts. Experimental results on a set of over 450 images are reported.