Zero-Shot Structure-Preserving Diffusion Model for High Dynamic Range Tone Mapping

Ruoxi Zhu, Shusong Xu, Peiye Liu, Sicheng Li, Yanheng Lu, Dimin Niu, Zihao Liu, Zihao Meng, Zhiyong Li, Xinhua Chen, Yibo Fan

Abstract: Tone mapping techniques, aiming to convert high dynamic range (HDR) images to high-quality low dynamic range (LDR) images for display, play a more crucial role in real-world vision systems with the increasing application of HDR images. However, obtaining paired HDR and high-quality LDR images is difficult, posing a challenge to deep learning based tone mapping methods. To over-come this challenge, we propose a novel zero-shot tone mapping framework that utilizes shared structure knowl-edge, allowing us to transfer a pre-trained mapping model from the LDR domain to HDR fields without paired training data. Our approach involves decomposing both the LDR and HDR images into two components: structural in-formation and tonal information. To preserve the original image's structure, we modify the reverse sampling process of a diffusion model and explicitly incorporate the struc-ture information into the intermediate results. Additionally, for improved image details, we introduce a dual-control network architecture that enables different types of conditional inputs to control different scales of the output. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, our model ex-hibits versatility and can be applied to other low-level vi-sion tasks without retraining. The code is available at https://github.com/ZSDM-HDRIZero-Shot-Diffusion-HDR.