Automatic exposure selection for High Dynamic Range photography

High Dynamic Range photography involves fusing bracket images taken at different exposure values in order to compensate for the low dynamic range of image sensors in digital and smartphone cameras. Bracket images normally consist of an image taken by the auto-exposure setting of a camera as well as two other images at ±n exposure values where n is manually specified or selected. This paper discusses a method to automatically and optimally select exposures by using pixel clustering and local entropy. The results obtained show that the developed automatic exposure selection method provides more scene details compared to the manual or fixed exposure selection.