Estimation-Theoretic Approach to Dynamic Range Enhancement Using Multiple Exposures

This paper presents an approach for improving the effective dynamic range of cameras by using multiple photographs of the same scene taken with different exposure times. Using this method enables the photographer to accurately capture scenes that contain high dynamic range by using a device with low dynamic range. This allows the capture of scenes that have both very bright and very dark regions. The approach requires an initial camera calibration to determine the response function of the camera. Once the response function for a camera is known, high dynamic range images can be computed easily with only a small number of captured images. The high dynamic range output image consists of a weighted average of data from the multiply-exposed input images, and thus contains information captured by each of the input images. From a computational standpoint, the proposed algorithm is very efficient and requires little processing time to determine a solution. Keywords Dynamic range, multiframe..