Exposure fusion using a relative generative adversarial network

Abstract

At present, the generative adversarial network (GAN) plays an important role in learning tasks. The basic idea of a GAN is to train the discriminator and generator simultaneously. A GAN-based inverse tone mapping method can generate high dynamic range (HDR) images corresponding to a scene according to multiple image sequences of a scene with different exposures. However, subsequent tone mapping algorithm processing is needed to display it on a general device. This paper proposes an end-to-end multi-exposure image fusion algorithm based on a relative GAN (called RaGAN-EF), which can fuse multiple image sequences with different exposures directly to generate a high-quality image that can be displayed on a general device without further processing. The RaGAN is used to design the loss function, which can retain more details in the source images. In addition, the number of input image sequences of multi-exposure image fusion algorithms is often uncertain, which limits the application of many existing GANs. This paper proposes a convolutional layer with weights shared between channels, which can solve the problem of variable input length. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better in terms of both objective evaluation and visual quality.