# Automatic Flare Spot Artifact Detection and Removal in Photographs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.04384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04384/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 0 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Flare7K: A Phenomenological Nighttime Flare Removal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06570/) (2022)
- [Flare7K++: Mixing Synthetic and Real Datasets for Nighttime Flare Removal and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04236/) (2023)
- [Nighttime Smartphone Reflective Flare Removal Using Optical Center Symmetry Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15046/) (2023)
- [Improving Lens Flare Removal with General Purpose Pipeline and Multiple Light Sources Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16460/) (2023)
- [MFDNet: Multi-Frequency Deflare Network for Efficient Nighttime Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18079/) (2024)
- [Let's See Clearly: Contaminant Artifact Removal for Moving Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08852/) (2021)
- [LightsOut: Diffusion-based Outpainting for Enhanced Lens Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15868/) (2025)
- [Disentangle Nighttime Lens Flares: Self-supervised Generation-based Lens Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10714/) (2025)
- [Removing Image Artifacts From Scratched Lens Protectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05746/) (2023)
- [Toward Real Flare Removal: A Comprehensive Pipeline and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15884/) (2023)
- [DFDNet: Dynamic Frequency-Guided De-Flare Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17489/) (2025)
- [DeflareMamba: Hierarchical Vision Mamba for Contextually Consistent Lens Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02113/) (2025)
- [Learning to Remove Lens Flare in Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09016/) (2025)
- [SLCFormer: Spectral-Local Context Transformer with Physics-Grounded Flare Synthesis for Nighttime Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15221/) (2025)
- [An Analysis of Generative Methods for Multiple Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02146/) (2022)
- [Toward Flare-Free Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14354/) (2023)
- [Physics-Informed Video Flare Synthesis and Removal Leveraging Motion Independence between Flare and Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11327/) (2025)
- [Deep Light Pollution Removal in Night Cityscape Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09145/) (2026)
- [Semi-LAR: Semi-supervised Contrastive Learning with Linear Attention for Removal of Nighttime Flares](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18156/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.