Region-of-interest based local tone mappings

This paper introduces region of interest (ROI) as a functionality to local tone mappings of high dynamic range (HDR) radiance maps. In the proposed scheme, a new quadratic regularization method is provided to decompose the luminance of an HDR radiance map into a base layer with large gradients and a detail layer with small gradients. An ROI based global tone mapping is designed to compress the base layer. Since the dynamic range of a display device is limited, more dynamic ranges are assigned to the base layer in the ROI such that the visual quality of the ROI is preserved better. The detail layer can be amplified to enhance local contrasts such that the output LDR images look sharper. Both automatic and interactive modes are provided. With our automatic mode, the generated low dynamic range (LDR) images look natural and local details are also preserved very well. In addition, a user friendly interactive mode is provided which is also able to produce dynamic LDR images in real time.