Snapshot High Dynamic Range Imaging with a Polarization Camera
This provides a practical solution for HDR imaging tasks like navigation and photography, but it is incremental as it adapts existing polarization camera technology.
The paper tackles the problem of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging by converting a polarization camera into an HDR camera using a linear polarizer to capture four varied exposures simultaneously, and it demonstrates effectiveness through real-world experiments.
High dynamic range (HDR) images are important for a range of tasks, from navigation to consumer photography. Accordingly, a host of specialized HDR sensors have been developed, the most successful of which are based on capturing variable per-pixel exposures. In essence, these methods capture an entire exposure bracket sequence at once in a single shot. This paper presents a straightforward but highly effective approach for turning an off-the-shelf polarization camera into a high-performance HDR camera. By placing a linear polarizer in front of the polarization camera, we are able to simultaneously capture four images with varied exposures, which are determined by the orientation of the polarizer. We develop an outlier-robust and self-calibrating algorithm to reconstruct an HDR image (at a single polarity) from these measurements. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with extensive real-world experiments.