Can a background estimate or a subject mask fix the edge ring that burst alignment leaves behind?

What it found

Follow-up to sensing-ghostalign, on the same synthetic bursts (one disc moving across a still scene, Poisson shot noise, Gaussian read noise, a large sensor with 4× the pixel area). Four explicit treatments of the edge ring — frame 0 alone, a per-pixel temporal median, the aligned merge, the reject-only merge, each gated by a subject mask estimated against the temporal median — all leave the ring at 21.6–27.2 dB at 8 frames against 31.6–32.0 dB for the large frame. None beats plain aligned-plus-reject (27.0 dB at 1 px per frame); the median is the worst (22.3 dB) unless the subject moves 4 px per frame, and the mask recalls only 44–64% of a slow subject. A negative result. Stylised: synthetic scenes, one flat rigid disc, translation only.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.