HDR-ARtiSt: High dynamic range advanced real-time imaging system

This paper describes the HDR-ARtiSt hardware platform, a FPGA-based architecture that can produce a real-time high dynamic range video from successive image acquisition. The hardware platform is built around a standard low dynamic range (LDR) CMOS sensor and a Virtex 5 FPGA board. The CMOS sensor is a EV76C560 provided by e2v. This 1.3 Megapixel device offers novel pixel integration/readout modes and embedded image pre-processing capabilities including multiframe acquisition with various exposure times. Our approach consists of a hardware architecture with different algorithms: double exposure control during image capture, building of an HDR image by combining the multiple frames, and final tone mapping for viewing on a LCD display. Our video camera system is able to achieve a real-time video rate of 30 frames per second for a full sensor resolution of 1,280 × 1,024 pixels.