Improving Temporal Stability in Inverse Tone-Mapped High Dynamic Range Video

Inverse tone mapping (ITM) is widely used to convert a standard dynamic range (SDR) image to its high dynamic range (HDR) version. While using frame-specific ITMs for a video sequence, temporal stability needs to be maintained not to cause visual artifacts such as flashing, flickering and delayed intensity-change. In this paper, we propose a weighted temporal filtering method to smooth look-up table (LUT)-based ITM to avoid such artifacts. Our proposed method uses a LUT-similarity measure and a histogram-based content-aware weighing for filtering LUTs in the time-domain. Our method is highly portable and can be applied to any set of LUT-based ITMs, agnostic to the way of their generation. Experiments exhibit effectiveness of our method.