535 research outputs found
Locally Non-rigid Registration for Mobile HDR Photography
Image registration for stack-based HDR photography is challenging. If not
properly accounted for, camera motion and scene changes result in artifacts in
the composite image. Unfortunately, existing methods to address this problem
are either accurate, but too slow for mobile devices, or fast, but prone to
failing. We propose a method that fills this void: our approach is extremely
fast---under 700ms on a commercial tablet for a pair of 5MP images---and
prevents the artifacts that arise from insufficient registration quality
Fully-automatic inverse tone mapping algorithm based on dynamic mid-level tone mapping
High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays can show images with higher color contrast levels and peak luminosities than the common Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays. However, most existing video content is recorded and/or graded in LDR format. To show LDR content on HDR displays, it needs to be up-scaled using a so-called inverse tone mapping algorithm. Several techniques for inverse tone mapping have been proposed in the last years, going from simple approaches based on global and local operators to more advanced algorithms such as neural networks. Some of the drawbacks of existing techniques for inverse tone mapping are the need for human intervention, the high computation time for more advanced algorithms, limited low peak brightness, and the lack of the preservation of the artistic intentions. In this paper, we propose a fully-automatic inverse tone mapping operator based on mid-level mapping capable of real-time video processing. Our proposed algorithm allows expanding LDR images into HDR images with peak brightness over 1000 nits, preserving the artistic intentions inherent to the HDR domain. We assessed our results using the full-reference objective quality metrics HDR-VDP-2.2 and DRIM, and carrying out a subjective pair-wise comparison experiment. We compared our results with those obtained with the most recent methods found in the literature. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art of simple inverse tone mapping methods and its performance is similar to other more complex and time-consuming advanced techniques
A Perceptually Optimized and Self-Calibrated Tone Mapping Operator
With the increasing popularity and accessibility of high dynamic range (HDR)
photography, tone mapping operators (TMOs) for dynamic range compression are
practically demanding. In this paper, we develop a two-stage neural
network-based TMO that is self-calibrated and perceptually optimized. In Stage
one, motivated by the physiology of the early stages of the human visual
system, we first decompose an HDR image into a normalized Laplacian pyramid. We
then use two lightweight deep neural networks (DNNs), taking the normalized
representation as input and estimating the Laplacian pyramid of the
corresponding LDR image. We optimize the tone mapping network by minimizing the
normalized Laplacian pyramid distance (NLPD), a perceptual metric aligning with
human judgments of tone-mapped image quality. In Stage two, the input HDR image
is self-calibrated to compute the final LDR image. We feed the same HDR image
but rescaled with different maximum luminances to the learned tone mapping
network, and generate a pseudo-multi-exposure image stack with different detail
visibility and color saturation. We then train another lightweight DNN to fuse
the LDR image stack into a desired LDR image by maximizing a variant of the
structural similarity index for multi-exposure image fusion (MEF-SSIM), which
has been proven perceptually relevant to fused image quality. The proposed
self-calibration mechanism through MEF enables our TMO to accept uncalibrated
HDR images, while being physiology-driven. Extensive experiments show that our
method produces images with consistently better visual quality. Additionally,
since our method builds upon three lightweight DNNs, it is among the fastest
local TMOs.Comment: 20 pages,18 figure
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