A High Dynamic Range Microscopic Video System

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging technology has been widely implemented in digital microscopes for taking still images of high contrast specimens. However, capturing HDR microscopic video is much more challenging. In this paper, we present a HDR microscopic video system based on GPU accelerated computing. We show that by combining CPU and GPU computing, it is possible to build a stable HDR video system using a single off the shelf camera. We show that capturing multiple frames of different exposure intervals, aligning consecutive neighboring frames, constructing HDR radiance map and tone mapping the radiance map for display, can be realized by using GPU computing to accelerate the processing speed. We present experimental results to show the effectiveness of our system and how HDR video can reveal much more details than conventional videos.

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