Variational approach for the fusion of exposure bracketed pairs

When taking pictures of a dark scene with artificial lighting, ambient light is not sufficient for most cameras to obtain both accurate color and detail information. The exposure bracketing feature usually available in many camera models enables the user to obtain a series of pictures taken in rapid...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Bertalmío, Marcelo, Levine, Stacey
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2013
País:España
Institución:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/41690
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/41690
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIP.2012.2221730
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Color transfer
Image denoising
Image fusion
Variational methods
Descripción
Sumario:When taking pictures of a dark scene with artificial lighting, ambient light is not sufficient for most cameras to obtain both accurate color and detail information. The exposure bracketing feature usually available in many camera models enables the user to obtain a series of pictures taken in rapid succession with different exposure times; the implicit idea is that the user picks the best image from this set. But in many cases, none of these images is good enough; in general, good brightness and color information are retained from longer-exposure settings, whereas sharp details are obtained from shorter ones. In this paper, we propose a variational method for automatically combining an exposure-bracketed pair of images within a single picture that reflects the desired properties of each one. We introduce an energy functional consisting of two terms, one measuring the difference in edge information with the short-exposure image and the other measuring the local color difference with a warped version of the long-exposure image. This method is able to handle camera and subject motion as well as noise, and the results compare favorably with the state of the art.