Exposure Fusion

Tom Mertens, Jan Kautz and Frank Van Reeth

In proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2007

Abstract

We propose a technique for fusing a bracketed exposure sequence into a high quality image, without converting to HDR first. Skipping the physically-based HDR assembly step simplifies the acquisition pipeline. This avoids camera response curve calibration and is computationally efficient. It also allows for including flash images in the sequence. Our technique blends multiple exposures, guided by simple quality measures like saturation and contrast. This is done in a multi-resolution fashion to account for the brightness variation in the sequence. The resulting image quality is comparable to existing tone mapping operators.

Downloads

Paper [PDF]
Matlab code [ZIP]

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jacques Joffre, Jesse Levinson, Min H. Kim and Amit Agrawal for sharing their photographs.

Impact of Exposure Fusion

(March 2008) Our work on Exposure Fusion recently gained some attention outside of academia. Our technique serves as the basis for these novel tools:

Enfuse a freeware tool, available as standalone application, and as a Photoshop Lightroom plugin. A recent article about Enfuse.
TuFuse, another freeware tool.

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