Signal Processing - September 2016 - 36

SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR
COMPUTATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND DISPLAYS

Pradeep Sen and Cecilia Aguerrebere

Practical High Dynamic Range Imaging of Everyday Scenes
Photographing the world as we see it with our own eyes

H

igh dynamic range (HDR) imaging enables the capture
of an extremely wide range of the illumination present in
a scene and so produces images that more closely resemble what we see with our own eyes. In this article, we
explain the problem of limited dynamic range in the standard
imaging pipeline and then present a survey of state-of-the-art
research in HDR imaging, including the technology's history,
specialized cameras that capture HDR images directly,
and algorithms for capturing HDR images using
sequential stacks of differently exposed images.
Because this last is among the most common methods for capturing HDR images using conventional
digital cameras, we also discuss algorithms to
address artifacts that occur when using with this
method for dynamic scenes. Finally, we consider
systems for the capture of HDR video and conclude by reviewing open problems and challenges in HDR imaging.

Overview of HDR imaging

©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/YAKOBCHUK

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2016.2581848
Date of publication: 2 September 2016

36

The world around us is visually rich and complex. Some of this richness comes from the wide
range of illumination present in daily scenes-the
illumination intensity between the brightest and the
darkest parts of a scene can vary by many orders magnitude. Fortunately, the human visual system can
observe very wide ranges of luminosity by means of brightness adaptation, which allows us, for example, to easily see
the bright scene outside a window as well as the darkened
interior. A digital camera, on the other hand, has a sensor
that responds linearly to illumination; coupled with the sensor pixels' limited capacity to store energy and the noise
present in the acquisition process, this fundamentally limits
the sensor's measurable dynamic range. The low dynamic
range (LDR) of modern digital cameras is a major factor
preventing them from capturing images as humans see
them (Figure 1). For this reason, an entire research community, both in academia and industry, is engaged in

IEEE SIgnal ProcESSIng MagazInE

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September 2016

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - September 2016

Signal Processing - September 2016 - Cover1
Signal Processing - September 2016 - Cover2
Signal Processing - September 2016 - 1
Signal Processing - September 2016 - 2
Signal Processing - September 2016 - 3
Signal Processing - September 2016 - 4
Signal Processing - September 2016 - 5
Signal Processing - September 2016 - 6
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Signal Processing - September 2016 - Cover3
Signal Processing - September 2016 - Cover4
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