Luminance-chrominance-gradient high dynamic range imaging with improved bitonic filter tone mapping technique

In this paper, we will discuss a new process for High-Dynamic-Range Imaging. In contrast to the traditional method, we are processing the High-Dynamic-Range imaging process in luminance-chrominance-gradient space rather than RGB space. The main motive is to get the more efficient technique and also to avoid color-distortion generating from three different color channels. We introduced a camera responsive function for luminance channel so that we can find out the HDR luminance. On the other hand, for chrominance channels, we introduced weighting in relation to the saturation level. Our technique produces more natural tone-mapped images with more information. Once the luminance, chrominance, and gradient values are extracted from the image, based on logarithmic of the luminance value, the tone mapping technique approximates the appearance of the HDR image. In local tone mapping, there is a detail loss, artifact and higher computation time because of the tone mapping technique. To increase the image quality and to increase the performance of tone mapping is the main idea of the research. Improved Bitonic Tone Mapping (IBTM) is a new technique proposed for efficient tone mapping. In this method, edges have high weights than flat surfaces and a weight factor is added to the bitonic filter. When compared to different tones mapping algorithms like Reinhard, Drago, Exposure, and Gamma, Local adoption etc. shows that from the proposed technique we can achieve higher performance.