Practical-HDR: A Simple and Effective Method for Merging High Dynamic Range Videos

We introduce a novel algorithm for obtaining High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos from Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos with varying shutter speed or ISO per frame. This capturing technique represents today one of the most popular HDR video acquisition methods, thanks to the availability and the low cost of the equipment required; i.e., an off-the-shelf DSLR camera. However, naïvely merging SDR frames into an HDR video can produce artifacts such as ghosts (when the scene is dynamic), and blurry edges (when the camera moves). In this work, we present a straightforward, easy to implement, and fast technique that produces reasonable results in a short time. This is key for having quick previews of the captured videos without waiting for a long processing time. This is extremely important, especially when capturing videos on modern mobile devices such as smartphones and/or tablets.

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