Color high dynamic range (HDR) imaging: The luminance-chrominance approach, International journal of imaging systems and technology

In this paper, we address the issue of color in high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. In contrast to state-of-the-art meth-ods, we propose to move the complete HDR imaging pro-cess from RGB to a luminance-chrominance color space. Our aim is to get a more computationally efficient technique and to avoid also any possible color distortions originating from three color channels processed separately. To achieve this, we build a camera response function for the luminance channel only and weight and compose the HDR luminance accordingly, while for the chrominance channels we apply weighting in relation with the saturation level. We demon-strate that our technique yields natural and pleasant to per-ceive tone-mapped images and is also more robust to noise. 1