Lighting compensation in outdoors

The automatic monitoring applications in outdoors based on computer vision algorithms, are strongly influenced by variations in lighting due to changes in the weather conditions. In particular, shadows can produce undesirable effects on the image analysis causing poor results in tracking or object recognition applications. In addition, it is true that modern cameras have associated strategies for automatic compensation of brightness (white balance), but some elements continue appearing on the scene creating difficulties in the understanding process. Based on the above, we present in this paper a method and some partial experimental results for the normalization of the illumination component in image sequences captured by a fixed camera in outdoors. We used the concept of intrinsic image decomposition into two components: illumination and reflectance. The qualitative results demonstrate the potential of the method to attenuate the effects caused by changes in the illumination of a scene in outdoors, where the main source of light is the sun.