Linguistics

Engineering

Philosophy

High dynamic range

Aerospace engineering

Quantization (signal processing)

Computer graphics (images)

Clipping (morphology)

Range (aeronautics)

Iterative reconstruction

Computer science

Pipeline (software)

Image (mathematics)

Artificial intelligence

Programming language

Dynamic range

Computer vision

Recovering a high dynamic range (HDR) image from a single low dynamic range (LDR) input image is challenging due to missing details in under-/over-exposed regions caused by quantization and saturation of camera sensors. In contrast to existing learning-based methods, our core idea is to incorporate the domain knowledge of the LDR image formation pipeline into our model. We model the HDR-to-LDR image formation pipeline as the (1) dynamic range clipping, (2) non-linear mapping from a camera response function, and (3) quantization. We then propose to learn three specialized CNNs to reverse these steps. By decomposing the problem into specific sub-tasks, we impose effective physical constraints to facilitate the training of individual sub-networks. Finally, we jointly fine-tune the entire model end-to-end to reduce error accumulation. With extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on diverse image datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art single-image HDR reconstruction algorithms.

Single-Image HDR Reconstruction by Learning to Reverse the Camera Pipeline