High-dynamic-range imaging

About: High-dynamic-range imaging is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 766 publications have been published within this topic receiving 22577 citations.

Brightness, lightness, and specifying color in high-dynamic-range scenes and images

Abstract: Traditional color spaces have been widely used in a variety of applications including digital color imaging, color image quality, and color management. These spaces, however, were designed for the domain of color stimuli typically encountered with reflecting objects and image displays of such objects. This means the domain of stimuli with luminance levels from slightly above zero to that of a perfect diffuse white (or display white point). This limits the applicability of such spaces to color problems in HDR imaging. This is caused by their hard intercepts at zero luminance/lightness and by their uncertain applicability for colors brighter than diffuse white. To address HDR applications, two new color spaces were recently proposed, hdr-CIELAB and hdr-IPT. They are based on replacing the power-function nonlinearities in CIELAB and IPT with more physiologically plausible hyperbolic functions optimized to most closely simulate the original color spaces in the diffuse reflecting color domain. This paper presents the formulation of the new models, evaluations using Munsell data in comparison with CIELAB, IPT, and CIECAM02, two sets of lightness-scaling data above diffuse white, and various possible formulations of hdr-CIELAB and hdr-IPT to predict the visual results.

A JPEG backward-compatible HDR image compression

Abstract: High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging is expected to become one of the technologies that could shape next generation of consumer digital photography. Manufacturers are rolling out cameras and displays capable of capturing and rendering HDR images. The popularity and full public adoption of HDR content is however hindered by the lack of standards in evaluation of quality, file formats, and compression, as well as large legacy base of Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays that are unable to render HDR. To facilitate wide spread of HDR usage, the backward compatibility of HDR technology with commonly used legacy image storage, rendering, and compression is necessary. Although many tone-mapping algorithms were developed for generating viewable LDR images from HDR content, there is no consensus on which algorithm to use and under which conditions. This paper, via a series of subjective evaluations, demonstrates the dependency of perceived quality of the tone-mapped LDR images on environmental parameters and image content. Based on the results of subjective tests, it proposes to extend JPEG file format, as the most popular image format, in a backward compatible manner to also deal with HDR pictures. To this end, the paper provides an architecture to achieve such backward compatibility with JPEG and demonstrates efficiency of a simple implementation of this framework when compared to the state of the art HDR image compression.

Transmission illuminance proxy HDR imaging: A new technique to quantify luminous flux.

Abstract: A technique to measure arbitrarily complex luminous fluxes across large areas is presented. The technique is founded on high-dynamic range (HDR) imaging technology and can be achieved using a standard consumer digital camera and everyday materials such as printer-grade white paper. The same approach can also be used to determine the direct and diffuse components of illuminance. The technique has been named transmission illuminance proxy - high dynamic range imaging or TIP-HDRI.

Image acquisition technique for high dynamic range scenes using a multiband camera

Abstract: Multiband cameras have been studied and developed for accurate color reproduction. On the other hand, high dynamic range image acquisition is also strongly desired in many applications. Multiband cameras can potentially meet both needs if their sensitivities are properly controlled. In this article, a method for expansion of the dynamic range that uses a six-band camera consisting of three high-sensitivity bands and three low-sensitivity bands is introduced. Experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the method are also shown. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 31, 294–302, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20231

Adaptive exposure estimation for high dynamic range imaging applied to natural scenes and daylight skies

Abstract: Digital imaging of natural scenes and optical phenomena present on them (such as shadows, twilights, and crepuscular rays) can be a very challenging task because of the range spanned by the radiances impinging on the capture system. We propose a novel method for estimating the set of exposure times (bracketing set) needed to capture the full dynamic range of a scene with high dynamic range (HDR) content. The proposed method is adaptive to scene content and to any camera response and configuration, and it works on-line since the exposure times are estimated as the capturing process is ongoing. Besides, it requires no a priori information about scene content or radiance values. The resulting bracketing sets are minimal in the default method settings, but the user can set a tolerance for the maximum percentage of pixel population that is underexposed or saturated, which allows for a higher number of shots if a better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the HDR scene is desired. This method is based on the use of the camera response function that is needed for building the HDR radiance map by stitching together several differently exposed low dynamic range images of the scene. The use of HDR imaging techniques converts our digital camera into a tool for measuring the relative radiance outgoing from each point of the scene, and for each color channel. This is important for accurate characterization of optical phenomena present in the atmosphere while not suffering any loss of information due to its HDR. We have compared our method with the most similar one developed so far [IEEE Trans. Image Process.17, 1864 (2008)]. Results of the experiments carried out for 30 natural scenes show that our proposed method equals or outperforms the previously developed best approach, with less shots and shorter exposure times, thereby asserting the advantage of being adaptive to scene content for exposure time estimation. As we can also tune the balance between capturing time and the SNR in our method, we have compared its SNR performance against that of Barakat's method as well as against a ground-truth HDR image of maximum SNR. Results confirm the success of the proposed method in exploiting its tunability to achieve the desired balance of total Δt and SNR.