ARDO: Automatic Removal of Dynamic Objects

Abstract

We present a novel method to remove tourists, cars and other moving objects from photos of monuments, buildings and other attractions. Typically, this is a manual process. Nevertheless, our method is fully automatic and requires neither image stabilization or advanced hardware during acquisition. The method requires a set of images taken from roughly the same location using any consumer photo or video camera and synthesizes the decluttered result using two phases. In the first phase, these images are aligned on to each other using image features and affine transformations. The second phase merges the images to the final result using a median-based per pixel filtering. The results are pleasant looking, even with moving clouds and trees, and outperforms other techniques considering quality and manual intervention.