Radiance

Pixel

Engineering

High dynamic range

Aerospace engineering

High-dynamic-range imaging

Computer graphics (images)

Image processing

Digital imaging

Compositing

Range (aeronautics)

Computer science

Geology

Geography

Image (mathematics)

Artificial intelligence

Remote sensing

Digital image

Computer graphics

Dynamic range

Computer vision

We present a method of recovering high dynamic range radiance maps from photographs taken with conventional imaging equipment. In our method, multiple photographs of the scene are taken with different amounts of exposure. Our algorithm uses these differently exposed photographs to recover the response function of the imaging process, up to factor of scale, using the assumption of reciprocity. With the known response function, the algorithm can fuse the multiple photographs into a single, high dynamic range radiance map whose pixel values are proportional to the true radiance values in the scene. We demonstrate our method on images acquired with both photochemical and digital imaging processes. We discuss how this work is applicable in many areas of computer graphics involving digitized photographs, including image-based modeling, image compositing, and image processing. Lastly, we demonstrate a few applications of having high dynamic range radiance maps, such as synthesizing realistic motion blur and simulating the response of the human visual system.

Recovering high dynamic range radiance maps from photographs