HDRfeat: A feature-rich network for high dynamic range image reconstruction

A major challenge for high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction from multi-exposed low dynamic range (LDR) images, especially with dynamic scenes, is the extraction and merging of relevant contextual features in order to suppress any ghosting and blurring artifacts from moving objects. To tackle this, in this work we propose a novel network for HDR image reconstruction with deep and rich feature extraction layers, including residual attention blocks with sequential channel and spatial attention. For the compression of the rich-features to the HDR domain, a residual feature distillation block (RFDB) based architecture is adopted. In contrast to earlier deep-learning methods for HDR, the above contributions shift focus from merging/compression to feature extraction, the added value of which we demonstrate with ablation experiments. We present qualitative and quantitative comparisons on public benchmark datasets, showing that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art. The code is available at: https://github.com/CAiM-lab/HDRfeat. •A novel, feature-rich extraction network for HDR image reconstruction from multi-exposure images.•Hierarchical feature extraction, channel expansion, and bottleneck merging for summary features in reconstruction.•Residual attention block: sequential channel and spatial attention for targeted feature focus around inter-frame motion.•HDRfeat is the new state-of-the-art in HDR image reconstruction, demonstrated via extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets.