HDR image generation from LDR image with highlight removal

The emergency of High Dynamic Range (HDR) display device impels the study of generating HDR image from Low Dynamic Range (LDR) image. Most existing generation methods apply complicated handing to highlight areas in image, which perplexes the algorithm and introduces the probability of generating artifacts. In this paper, we investigate a separated scheme: instead of sophisticated treatment to the highlight areas during expanding, the processing to the highlight areas is separated from the dynamic range expansion, which facilitates the framework and reduces the artifacts. The image quality metric shows that the separated scheme reveals more details with little artifacts compared to the algorithms considered in the comparison; the experimental results prove that the proposed method allow to obtain high quality HDR image.