High dynamic range scene realization using two complementary images

Abstract

Many existing tone reproduction schemes are based on the use of a single high dynamic range (HDR) image and are therefore unable to accurately recover the local details and colors of the scene due to the limited information available. Accordingly, the current study develops a novel tone reproduction system which utilizes two images with different exposures to capture both the local details and color information of the low- and high-luminance regions of a scene. By computing the local region of each pixel, whose radius is determined via an iterative morphological erosion process, the proposed system implements a pixel-wise local tone mapping module which compresses the luminance range and enhances the local contrast in the low-exposure image. And a local color mapping module is applied to capture the precise color information from the high-exposure image. Subsequently, a fusion process is then performed to fuse the local tone mapping and color mapping results to generate highly realistic reproductions of HDR scenes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.