The highlight generated on the surface of an object under light irradiation conditions causes the loss of its own color information, which affects the quality of feature extraction in stereo matching and 3D reconstruction. Aiming at the phenomenon that the dichromatic reflection model containing diffuse reflection and specular reflection cannot accurately describe the component distribution of reflection in transparent PET bottles, a highlight removal method based on L2 normalized three component dichromatic reflection model is proposed. Firstly, a L2 normalized three component dichromatic reflection model is constructed for transparent PET images to elucidate the distribution of reflectance components in transparent PET bottles. Based on this model, decompose the global pixel information of the transparent PET image and calculate the L2 normalized chromaticity map; On this basis, calculate the L2 chromaticity intensity ratio of global pixels based on the L2 normalized chromaticity diagram. Next, perform clustering analysis on the L2 normalized chromaticity diagram using exponential transformation to detect the highlight areas of transparent PET bottles and capture the inherent color information of the PET bottles. Finally, combining L2 chromaticity intensity ratio to achieve pixel information recovery in highlight areas. The experimental part established a transparent PET bottle dataset and validated it. The experimental results showed that compared with the traditional dichromatic reflection model driven highlight removal method, the proposed method improved the mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity (SSIM) indicators by 12.1%, 21.1%, and 11.5%, respectively.