Extended Dynamic Range imaging: A spatial down-sampling approach

In recent years, many works have addressed the issues of generating high dynamic range (HDR) images from the low dynamic range (LDR) counterparts. Since the HDR image contains a broader range of physical values which cannot be recorded by conventional sensors, the previous approaches use a sequence of images captured with different exposures to synthesize an HDR image. In this paper, we propose a spatial down-sampling technique to extend the dynamic range of an LDR image and generate an image with a broader dynamic range. The idea is to trade the large resolution of an image with a large brightness range for intensity quantization, and produce a so-called Extended Dynamic Range (EDR) image. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is able to provide the better image quality than those derived from the existing LDR to HDR image conversion techniques.