Google and MIT have a way to remove reflections from photos

Taking pictures through a window has never been an easy task and usually the best you can hope for is a picture that’s only slightly obscured by your reflection. It may only be a minor inconvenience, but that didn’t stop some researchers from Google and MIT from developing a way to remove window reflections from pictures. Apparently, the algorithm that they use to achieve this can also remove things like fences and rain from your photos as well. 

Whenever I try to take a photo through a plane or hotel window, chances are there are plenty of reflections that show up on the final image and ruin it. Now, however, Google and MIT researchers have found a way to take these photos and automatically remove these reflections and other obstructions. In a paper they will present at Siggraph 2015 later this month, Tianfan Xue, Michael Rubinstein, Ce Liu and William T. Freeman show how you can take a short video sequence with your phone and then let their algorithms do their magic. Reflections, rain drops and fences mostly disappear from the final image. The algorithms looks at the different images from the video and then figure out what’s an obstruction in the foreground and what’s part of the background. Others have tried this before, but none of their results are as good as what these researcher came up with.