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Quality-driven tone-mapping operator: a pseudo-exposure fusion-based approach

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Abstract

High dynamic range (HDR) images can present realistic scenes with improved detail in high- and low-brightness regions. Due to their limitations in application, HDR images are often processed by tone-mapping operators (TMOs) to be backward-compatible with traditional devices. Hence, for a better visual experience, a TMO should naturally preserve the original scene information with image quality as a guideline. With such motivation, we propose a new quality-driven TMO (QdTMO) by using a pseudo-exposure scheme and a local optimal exposed image (LOEI) fusion network. First, a pseudo-exposure scheme is designed to generate richly detailed LOEIs for different brightness regions of the image. Then, scene information in the original HDR image can be naturally preserved by a specifically designed LOEIs fusion network. Finally, the exposure residual energy and brightness naturalness are used to optimize the pseudo-exposure scheme and LOEI fusion for better quality in the resulting tone-mapped image. Experimental results demonstrate that tone-mapped images generated by the proposed QdTMO have better performance than existing TMOs in both subjective and objective evaluations.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (61871247, 61671258), Natural Science Foudation of Zhejiang Province (LY19F020009, LQ20F010002), Natural Science Foundation of Ningbo (2019A610101), Scientific Research Plan of Education Department of Zhejiang Province (Y201839115, Y201941004), and it was also sponsored by the K.C. Wong Magna Fund of Ningbo University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Science and Technology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, 315000, China

    Yang Song & Haiyong Xu

  2. Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ningbo University, Ningbo, 315000, China

    Mei Yu & Gangyi Jiang

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  1. Yang Song
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  2. Mei Yu
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  3. Haiyong Xu
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  4. Gangyi Jiang
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Correspondence to Mei Yu.

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Song, Y., Yu, M., Xu, H. et al. Quality-driven tone-mapping operator: a pseudo-exposure fusion-based approach. SIViP 15, 529–537 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-020-01773-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-020-01773-6

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