/ESBN

Exposure-Structure Blending Network for High Dynamic Range Imaging of Dynamic Scenes

Primary LanguagePython

ESBN

Exposure-Structure Blending Network for High Dynamic Range Imaging of Dynamic Scenes
Sang-hoon Lee, Haesoo Chung, Nam Ik Cho

Introduction

This repository provides a code for an HDR imaging algorithm and result images described in our accepted IEEE ACCESS paper.

Usage

  1. Prepare the Kalantari dataset
  2. Make tfrecord files for training samples using "make_tfrecord.py"
  3. Train the alignment networks and the merging network using "training_align_high.py", "training_align_low.py" and "training_fusion.py"
  4. Reconstruct the aligned images and fused hdr images using "reconstruction_align2.py" and "reconstruction_fusion.py"
  • You should change the file pathes in the codes.

Abstract

This paper presents a deep end-to-end network for high dynamic range (HDR) imaging of dynamic scenes with background and foreground motions. Generating an HDR image from a sequence of multi-exposure images is a challenging process when the images have misalignments by being taken in a dynamic situation. Hence, recent methods first align the multi-exposure images to the reference by using patch matching, optical flow, homography transformation, or attention module before the merging. In this paper, we propose a deep network that synthesizes the aligned images as a result of blending the information from multi-exposure images, because explicitly aligning photos with different exposures is inherently a difficult problem. Specifically, the proposed network generates under/over-exposure images that are structurally aligned to the reference, by blending all the information from the dynamic multiexposure images. Our primary idea is that blending two images in the deep-feature-domain is effective for synthesizing multi-exposure images that are structurally aligned to the reference, resulting in betteraligned images than the pixel-domain blending or geometric transformation methods. Specifically, our alignment network consists of a two-way encoder for extracting features from two images separately, several convolution layers for blending deep features, and a decoder for constructing the aligned images. The proposed network is shown to generate the aligned images with a wide range of exposure differences very well and thus can be effectively used for the HDR imaging of dynamic scenes. Moreover, by adding a simple merging network after the alignment network and training the overall system end-to-end, we obtain a performance gain compared to the recent state-of-the-art methods.

Citation

@article{lee2020exposure,
  title={Exposure-Structure Blending Network for High Dynamic Range Imaging of Dynamic Scenes},
  author={Lee, Sang-Hoon and Chung, Haesoo and Cho, Nam Ik},
  journal={IEEE Access},
  volume={8},
  pages={117428--117438},
  year={2020},
  publisher={IEEE}
}