Image Manipulation: Red Eye Effect removal tools, techniques & solutions

This post is about the resources available for Red Eye Effect removal during image manipulation/photo editing. The are different library, scripts, tools, techniques and solution to achieve the same. Here we will go through some of those to have better understanding of available solutions.

The topics we will be covering here,

• What do you mean by Red Eye Effect
• Some Red Eye Effect Examples
• Available Library to reduce red eye effect
• Custom Red Eye removal algorithm
• Available Online Solutions
• Using Tool ImageMagick
• Using Tool Gimp
• Available Scripts
• Manual and/or automated solutions

What do you mean by Red Eye Effect

To understand the red eye removal first we need to know what Red Eye Effect is.

The red-eye effect in photography is the common appearance of red pupils in color photographs of eyes. It occurs when using a photographic flash very close to the camera lens (as with most compact cameras), in ambient low light.

Some Red Eye Effect Examples

Bold Red Eye:

We won’t go deep into the discussion that how this red effect happens and the causes etc. We will try to cover the solutions to reduce the effect in photo editing. The corrected version should look like,

Available Library to reduce red eye effect

OpenCV  (Open Source Computer Vision) is a library of programming functions for real time computer vision.

To get started  with opencv, have a look at InstallGuide , Books  and how to use with Eclipse,

To use the library to remove red eye effect eg.

Removing red eyes with opencv and python

Opencv library is written in C++, to use the same in java you can use javacv

For more details see below links.

Java opencv Bindings  

Javacv

Javacpp

Custom Red Eye removal algorithm

If required, you can write your own custom red eye algorithm to achieve the same. eg.

Red eye reduction algorithm

Write own program to do the same, eg, in Java

Redeye Correction in Digital Photographs,

Red Eye reduction in Flex:

Use adobe pixelbenderpluginfor same,

Example, Red eye reduction in flex

Available Online Solutions

• editor.pho.to is one of such solution. It allows both online photo editing service and is also be exposed as api.
  See how you can reduce red eye effect online, post .
  For details look at the services offered, Services
• Lunapic
  Check online photo editing and red eye reduction functionality.
• Fixredeye
  Check online photo editing and red eye reduction functionality.
• Try these,
  resize.imagevenue.com
  www.flipmyphotos.com
• Offline tools:
  Photoscape is a fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos which also supports red eye removal.
  Picasa, check how to reduce red eye effect.

Using Tool ImageMagick

Imagemagick  is well know photo editing tool. red eye effect can also reduced using convert command.

Check post entry,

convert.exe before.jpg -region "230x140+60+130" ^
-fill black ^
-fuzz 25%% ^
-opaque rgb("192","00","10") ^
after.jpg

You can control both area and saturation of fill-up colors while reducing the red eye effect.

Using Tool Gimp

Gimp  is very well know photo editing tool. It comes up with red eye removal plugin, Red_Eye_Removal Plugin

You can control both area and saturation etc. while editing.

The tool also available in batch model which makes the tool to be available both online and offline usage. We will see examples in later threads how to reduce the red eye effect from an image using gimp in batch mode online way calling gimp console from java.

Available Scripts

There are many scripts also available from different people for red eye effect removal, see if that helps you to use.

imagemagick-redeye

gimpguru-RedEye2

Manual and/or automated solutions

There are limited solution available for automated red eye removal. And on top of that most of the automated solution and not that highly accurate in removing the red eye effect. The manual solution includes user selection of red eye area selection and saturation level of the fill-up color used in the process.

You can explore the different available solutions mentioned above and see which one fits best to your requirements.