  Flare spot is one type of flare artifact caused by a number of conditions,
frequently provoked by one or more high-luminance sources within or close to
the camera field of view. When light rays coming from a high-luminance source
reach the front element of a camera, it can produce intra-reflections within
camera elements that emerge at the film plane forming non-image information or
flare on the captured image. Even though preventive mechanisms are used,
artifacts can appear. In this paper, we propose a robust computational method
to automatically detect and remove flare spot artifacts. Our contribution is
threefold: firstly, we propose a characterization which is based on intrinsic
properties that a flare spot is likely to satisfy; secondly, we define a new
confidence measure able to select flare spots among the candidates; and,
finally, a method to accurately determine the flare region is given. Then, the
detected artifacts are removed by using exemplar-based inpainting. We show that
our algorithm achieve top-tier quantitative and qualitative performance.
