A real-time high dynamic range HD video camera

Standard cameras suffer from low video quality in high dynamic range scenes. In such scenes, parts of the video are either too dark or too bright. This is because lighting is very unevenly distributed in a high dynamic range scene. A standard camera, which typically has a 10 or 12 bit sensor, cannot capture the information both in dark and bright regions with one exposure. High dynamic range (HDR) imaging addresses this problem by fusing information from multiple exposures and rendering a dynamic range compressed result, which is also called dynamic range enhancement (DRE) or tone mapping. DRE is a challenging problem because human perception of brightness/contrast is quite complex and is highly dependent on image content. We present an embedded real-time HDR video camera system that provides 30fps, 720p/1080p high dynamic range video.