Multi-Exposure HDR Composition by Gated Swin Transformer
This addresses ghosting and detail issues in HDR imaging for photography and computer vision applications, representing an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles ghost artifacts and detail loss in multi-exposure HDR imaging by proposing a model based on Swin Transformer with feature selection gates and self-attention, achieving accuracy on par with top models while gaining higher efficiency.
Fusing a sequence of perfectly aligned images captured at various exposures, has shown great potential to approach High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging by sensors with limited dynamic range. However, in the presence of large motion of scene objects or the camera, mis-alignment is almost inevitable and leads to the notorious ``ghost'' artifacts. Besides, factors such as the noise in the dark region or color saturation in the over-bright region may also fail to fill local image details to the HDR image. This paper provides a novel multi-exposure fusion model based on Swin Transformer. Particularly, we design feature selection gates, which are integrated with the feature extraction layers to detect outliers and block them from HDR image synthesis. To reconstruct the missing local details by well-aligned and properly-exposed regions, we exploit the long distance contextual dependency in the exposure-space pyramid by the self-attention mechanism. Extensive numerical and visual evaluation has been conducted on a variety of benchmark datasets. The experiments show that our model achieves the accuracy on par with current top performing multi-exposure HDR imaging models, while gaining higher efficiency.