Patent ID: 7457477

Claim:
A system that facilitates generation of digital images, comprising: a component that receives a plurality of digital images of an object, wherein at least two of the digital images have differing illumination components, and wherein the at least two of the plurality of digital images includes a flash image that includes high frequency spatial components and a no-flash image that includes low frequency spatial components; an image generation component that merges a subset of the received images to generate a new image of the object, the image generation component merges high frequency components of one input image with low frequency components of another input image in generating the new image, wherein the one input image is taken with flash lighting and the other input image is taken without flash lighting, and wherein the subset of images are taken consecutively within a predetermined time frame; a comparison component that identifies an image artifact by analyzing the at least two of the digital images, wherein the image artifact is red-eye, shadows, and noise, and wherein a mask is generated that identifies regions of the shadows and specularities; a cost component that applies a cost function to the frequency components to mitigate combining disagreeing frequency components, the cost component is part of an algorithm that first splits the flash/no flash images into respective low and high pass components, then the images are combined using the cost function which is expressed as a blending mask; and a bilateral filter and a joint-bilateral filter, the bilateral filter employed to average spatially near pixels having similar intensity values by computing values of each pixel for the no-flash image and the joint bilateral filter employed to average spatially near pixels having similar intensity values by computing values of each pixel for the flash image.