High dynamic range imaging under noisy observations

We propose a radiance domain denoising frame work for the high dynamic range (HDR) imaging problem. The proposed method uses a maximum aposteriori probability (MAP) based reconstruction of the HDR image with total variation (TV) as the prior to avoid unnecessary smoothing of the radiance field. To make the computation with TV prior efficient, we extend the majorize-minimize method of upper bounding the total variation by a quadratic function to our case which has a nonlinear term arising from the camera response function. A theoretical justification for doing radiance domain denoising as opposed to image domain denoising is also provided. Our method yields better results, with the edges well preserved and noise reduced considerably.