Hybrid Patching for a Sequence of Differently Exposed Images With Moving Objects

It is very challenging to synthesize a high dynamic range (HDR) image from multiple differently exposed low dynamic range images when there are moving objects in the images. This is due to the fact that the moving objects will cause ghosting artifacts to appear in the synthesized HDR image. To prevent such artifacts, a patching algorithm is required to correct motion regions such that all the moving objects are synchronized in the differently exposed images. In this paper, a new optimization problem is formulated to correct the motion regions of the multiple differently exposed images by considering both spatial and temporal consistencies. The resultant scheme is a hybrid patching scheme composed of a correction method which is an intensity mapping function at pixel level, and a hole-filling method that uses block-level template matching. The proposed patching scheme is not only robust to large intensity changes in these input images, but also at regions that are over-or under-exposed. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to prevent ghosting artifacts from appearing in the final synthesized HDR image.