Automatic exposure selection and fusion for high-dynamic-range photography via smartphones
This work addresses the challenge of capturing high-quality HDR images on smartphones, which is an incremental improvement for mobile photography users.
The paper tackles the problem of high-dynamic-range photography on smartphones by introducing an automatic exposure selection method based on the camera characteristic function and a new fusion method using optimization and weighted averaging, resulting in an effective and computationally efficient solution as demonstrated in comparisons with existing methods.
High-dynamic-range (HDR) photography involves fusing a bracket of images taken at different exposure settings in order to compensate for the low dynamic range of digital cameras such as the ones used in smartphones. In this paper, a method for automatically selecting the exposure settings of such images is introduced based on the camera characteristic function. In addition, a new fusion method is introduced based on an optimization formulation and weighted averaging. Both of these methods are implemented on a smartphone platform as an HDR app to demonstrate the practicality of the introduced methods. Comparison results with several existing methods are presented indicating the effectiveness as well as the computational efficiency of the introduced solution.