A LDR image expansion method for displaying on HDR screen

With its excellent performance, the High Dynamic Range (HDR) display becomes more and more popular in many fields. As its availability and upcoming rapid development, the large amount of Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images needs to be expanded to benefit the advantages of HDR display. This urges the research of inverse tone mapping. In this paper, we propose a concise and effective approach to extend the dynamic range of LDR image. The scheme consists of three steps, first a non-linear expansion is performed to the LDR image for initial scaling, then the local average luminance of the original image is computed, finally an classic dodging and burning operation is used to extend the dynamic range from both the low and high levels. The implementation results show that the proposed method works well for incorrect exposed images. The image quality metric results suggest that our algorithm has better performance than other methods considered in the comparison.