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High Dynamic Range Imaging by Multiple Exposure Composition

总结

Although the hardware on imaging has a significant development in the past decades, the dynamic range of light we can reproduce is still quite limited compared to that of the real world. Particularly, people are often troubled when taking a photograph by that: a picture is under or over-exposed. This usually happens because the dynamic range of radiance found in the scene is too high to be captured by a camera. This fact brings out the demand for study on postprocessing-based High Dynamic Range (HDR), which is a technique of taking a series of images at different exposures with conventional camera, combining them, and adjusting the contrast ratios to produce one great looking image that is virtually impossible with a single aperture and shutter speed.

This invention provides a simple but effective way to accomplish HDR imaging in both static and dynamic scenes. Given multiple different exposed images, this technique is capable of producing pleasant and artifact-free HDR image by compositing them seamlessly with the guidance of gradient-based quality assessment. Especially, novel quality measures on visibility and consistency are developed based on the observation of gradient change among different exposures. Compared to previous work, this technique is quite appealing in practice since it is computational efficient and frees users from the tedious radiometric calibration and tone mapping process. Moreover, since two kinds of consistency assessments are designed based on the gradient direction change, this method is more flexible and can work in various dynamic scenarios.

申请号码

09/ENG/341

其他

Inventor(s): Professor Wai Kuen CHAM, Department of Electronic Engineering

Patent Status: US Patent Pending Licensing Status: Available for licensing

国家/地区

香港