High-dynamic-range image recovery from flash and non-flash image pairs

In this paper, we propose a novel method for creating HDR images from only two images—flash and non-flash images. Our method consists of two main steps, namely brightness gamma correction and bi-local chromatic adaptation transform (CAT). The brightness gamma correction performs series of increases and decreases of the non-flash brightness and yields multiple images with various exposure values. The bi-local CAT enhances the quality of each computed image by recovering missing details, using information from the flash image. The final multi-exposure images are then merged together to compute an HDR image. An evaluation shows that our HDR images, obtained by using only two LDR images, are close to HDR images, obtained by combining five manually taken multi-exposure images. Our method does not require the usage of a tripod and it is suitable for images of non-still objects, such as people, candle flames.

[1]  Shree K. Nayar,et al.  High dynamic range imaging: spatially varying pixel exposures , 2000, Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2000 (Cat. No.PR00662).

[2]  Masahiro Okuda,et al.  High dynamic range image acquisition using flash image , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[3]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  A perceptual framework for contrast processing of high dynamic range images , 2006, TAP.

[4]  Miguel Granados,et al.  Automatic noise modeling for ghost-free HDR reconstruction , 2013, ACM Trans. Graph..

[5]  Alexei A. Efros,et al.  Fast bilateral filtering for the display of high-dynamic-range images , 2002 .

[6]  William Puech,et al.  Ghost detection and removal in High Dynamic Range Images , 2009, 2009 17th European Signal Processing Conference.

[7]  Hui Ma,et al.  Image Deblurring with Blurred / Noisy Image Pairs , 2013 .

[8]  Marius Tico,et al.  Artifact-free High Dynamic Range imaging , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP).

[9]  Jian Sun,et al.  Guided Image Filtering , 2010, ECCV.

[10]  Eero P. Simoncelli,et al.  Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[11]  Jan Kautz,et al.  Exposure Fusion , 2009, 15th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications (PG'07).

[12]  Steve Mann,et al.  ON BEING `UNDIGITAL' WITH DIGITAL CAMERAS: EXTENDING DYNAMIC RANGE BY COMBINING DIFFERENTLY EXPOSED PICTURES , 1995 .

[13]  Shree K. Nayar,et al.  Assorted pixels: multi-sampled imaging with structural models , 2002, ECCV.

[14]  Gordon Wetzstein,et al.  Convolutional Sparse Coding for High Dynamic Range Imaging , 2016, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[15]  Julie Delon,et al.  Single shot high dynamic range imaging using piecewise linear estimators , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP).

[16]  Pradeep Sen,et al.  A versatile HDR video production system , 2011, ACM Trans. Graph..

[17]  Jan Kautz,et al.  Exposure Fusion , 2007 .

[18]  Mark D. Fairchild,et al.  iCAM06: A refined image appearance model for HDR image rendering , 2007, J. Vis. Commun. Image Represent..

[19]  Erik Reinhard,et al.  Motion Aware Exposure Bracketing for HDR Video , 2015, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[20]  Eli Shechtman,et al.  Patch-based high dynamic range video , 2013, ACM Trans. Graph..

[21]  Michael H. Brill,et al.  Color appearance models , 1998 .

[22]  R. R. Orozco,et al.  Multiview HDR Video Sequence Generation , 2016 .

[23]  Eli Shechtman,et al.  Robust patch-based hdr reconstruction of dynamic scenes , 2012, ACM Trans. Graph..

[24]  Hristina Hristova,et al.  Style-aware robust color transfer , 2015, CAE '15.

[25]  Frédo Durand,et al.  Flash photography enhancement via intrinsic relighting , 2004, SIGGRAPH 2004.

[26]  Mark D. Fairchild,et al.  Color Appearance Models: Fairchild/Color Appearance Models , 2013 .

[27]  Zhengguo Li,et al.  Single image brightening via exposure fusion , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[28]  Wolfgang Heidrich,et al.  HDR-VDP-2: a calibrated visual metric for visibility and quality predictions in all luminance conditions , 2011, SIGGRAPH 2011.

[29]  Michael F. Cohen,et al.  Digital photography with flash and no-flash image pairs , 2004, ACM Trans. Graph..

[30]  Mark D. Fairchild,et al.  iCAM framework for image appearance, differences, and quality , 2004, J. Electronic Imaging.

[31]  Xavier Ducloux,et al.  Style Aware Tone Expansion for HDR Displays , 2016, Graphics Interface.

[32]  Jitendra Malik,et al.  Recovering high dynamic range radiance maps from photographs , 1997, SIGGRAPH.

[33]  Neus Sabater,et al.  Optimal Transportation for Example-Guided Color Transfer , 2014, ACCV.