Scene-aware high dynamic range imaging

Wei-Ren Chen, Chuan-Ren Lee, Jui-Chiu Chiang

Abstract: High dynamic range (HDR) images offer better visual quality by allowing a wider range of luminance and the visual experience is much closer to reality. In this paper, a scene-aware HDR image system is proposed. According to the characteristics of the scene to be captured, the proposed system will first decide whether it is necessary to activate the HDR imaging mode. If the dynamic range of the scene is limited, no HDR imaging is performed. On the other hand, two or three LDR (low dynamic range) images with different exposures are captured to render high-quality HDR images in an efficient way. Experimental results show that the proposed HDR image system is capable of generating HDR images using either two or three LDR images and comparable to some existing techniques where three LDR images are always used.