Half-quadratic regularization based de-noising for high dynamic range image synthesis

It is possible to synthesis a high dynamic range (HDR) image by combining differently exposed low dynamic range (LDR) images of the same scene into one single image. For an HDR scene under low light condition, captured LDR images tend to be noisy, and the noise could usually be amplified during the synthesis process, causing severe degradation of the image quality. In order to reduce the noise during the HDR synthesis process, a de-noising scheme based on half-quadratic regularization is proposed for the synthesis of HDR images in this paper. By taking into consideration of two unique HDR image features, the proposed scheme effectively removes the noise, while the edges still being well preserved in the synthesized HDR images.