Scale-aware Two-stage High Dynamic Range Imaging
This work addresses ghosting artifacts in HDR imaging for photography applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles ghosting and saturation issues in high dynamic range imaging by proposing a scale-aware two-stage framework, achieving improved quality and speed on a typical test dataset.
Deep high dynamic range (HDR) imaging as an image translation issue has achieved great performance without explicit optical flow alignment. However, challenges remain over content association ambiguities especially caused by saturation and large-scale movements. To address the ghosting issue and enhance the details in saturated regions, we propose a scale-aware two-stage high dynamic range imaging framework (STHDR) to generate high-quality ghost-free HDR image. The scale-aware technique and two-stage fusion strategy can progressively and effectively improve the HDR composition performance. Specifically, our framework consists of feature alignment and two-stage fusion. In feature alignment, we propose a spatial correct module (SCM) to better exploit useful information among non-aligned features to avoid ghosting and saturation. In the first stage of feature fusion, we obtain a preliminary fusion result with little ghosting. In the second stage, we conflate the results of the first stage with aligned features to further reduce residual artifacts and thus improve the overall quality. Extensive experimental results on the typical test dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed STHDR in terms of speed and quality.