Automatic silhouette photography

A typical photograph of a natural scene captures ambient uniform illumination of the scene. As a special case, consider a scene in which we try to capture a poorly lit object with a brightly lit background such as the sun. Such a photograph could be visually stunning and is usually called a silhouette photograph. Consider the problem where we would like to generate a silhouette image from any given image of a natural scene automatically. We address this challenging problem in this paper and provide a complete computational pipeline which enables us to achieve this task. The key idea is to darken the foreground and illuminate the background in order to achieve the desired effect. We show that we are able to generate a high quality silhouette image from any given image of a natural scene consisting of a foreground object and a background.