Intelligent Detail Enhancement for Exposure Fusion

Multiscale exposure fusion is a fast approach to fuse several differently exposed images captured at the same high dynamic range (HDR) scene into a high-quality low-dynamic range (LDR) image. The fused image is expected to include all details of the input images. However the details in the brightest and darkest regions are usually not well preserved. Adding details that are extracted from the input images to the fused image is an efficient approach to overcome the problem. In this paper a new gradient domain weighted least square based image smoothing algorithm is proposed to extract the details in the brightest and darkest regions of the HDR scene. The extracted details are then added to an image that is produced using an edge-preserving smoothing pyramid based multiscale exposure fusion algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed detail enhanced exposure fusion algorithm can preserve details in saturated regions especially the brightest regions better than the state-of-the-art multiscale exposure fusion algorithms.