Fast Exposure Fusion Based on Histograms Segmentation

Usual cameras can gather only a small interval of intensities found in high dynamic range scenes. This fact leads to loss of details in acquired images and apparition of under or overexposed pixels. A popular approach to deal with this problem is to take several images differently exposed and fuse them into one single image. The exposure fusion is mostly performed as a weighted average between corresponding pixels. Weighting all pixels of the exposure bracketing slows the fusion process and makes realtime acquisition difficult. In this paper we present a fast exposure fusion method based on histograms segmentation. The segmentation phase reduces considerably the computations while preserving competitive fusion quality. We present also an automatic way to take enhanced exposures for fusion, using the segmented regions. Subjective and objective comparisons are conducted to prove the effectiveness of our method.