FUSION OF TONE-MAPPED HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE IMAGES BASED ON OBJECTIVE RANGE-INDEPENDENT QUALITY MAPS

Tone mapping operators for converting high dynamic range images to low dynamic range versions usually incur a loss of details compared to the original scene. As each operator performs differently in different image regions, this paper introduces a fusion technique that combines the output of several operators in a single image, based on objective quality maps that do not depend on the dynamic range of neither the input nor the output images, thus offering a better detail preservation capability compared to the case where each operator is independently applied. Results show significant improvement in the output quality obtained with the proposed technique compared to traditional tone mapping operators. Index Terms — High dynamic range, image fusion