Recently, high dynamic range (HDR) imaging has attracted much attention as a technology to reflect human visual characteristics owing to the development of the display and camera technology. This paper proposes a novel deep neural network model that reconstructs an HDR image from a single low dynamic range (LDR) image. The proposed model is based on a convolutional neural network composed of dilated convolutional layers and infers LDR images with various exposures and illumination from a single LDR image of the same scene. Then, the final HDR image can be formed by merging these inference results. It is relatively simple for the proposed method to find the mapping between the LDR and an HDR with a different bit depth because of the chaining structure inferring the relationship between the LDR images with brighter (or darker) exposures from a given LDR image. The method not only extends the range but also has the advantage of restoring the light information of the actual physical world. The proposed method is an end-to-end reconstruction process, and it has the advantage of being able to easily combine a network to extend an additional range. In the experimental results, the proposed method shows quantitative and qualitative improvement in performance, compared with the conventional algorithms.
With the variational lower bound of mutual information (MI), the estimation of MI can be understood as an optimization task via stochastic gradient descent. In this work, we start by showing how Mutual Information Neural Estimator (MINE) searches for the optimal function T that maximizes the Donsker-Varadhan representation. With our synthetic dataset, we directly observe the neural network outputs during the optimization to investigate why MINE succeeds or fails: We discover the drifting phenomenon, where the constant term of T is shifting through the optimization process, and analyze the instability caused by the interaction between the logsumexp and the insufficient batch size. Next, through theoretical and experimental evidence, we propose a novel lower bound that effectively regularizes the neural network to alleviate the problems of MINE. We also introduce an averaging strategy that produces an unbiased estimate by utilizing multiple batches to mitigate the batch size limitation. Finally, we show that L2 regularization achieves significant improvements in both discrete and continuous settings.
This paper proposes deep tone‐mapped HDRNET for high dynamic range (HDR) image generation in target display. The proposed network learns the relationship between a single low dynamic range (LDR) image and a tone‐mapped HDR image. Then, it restores saturated and black region details, which are lost information in existing images.
This study proposes a video retargeting method using deep neural network-based object detection. First, the meaningful regions of the input video denoted by bounding boxes of the object detection are extracted. In this case, the area is defined considering the size and number of bounding boxes for objects detected. The bounding boxes of each frame image are considered as regions of interest (RoIs). Second, the Siamese object tracking network is used to address high computational complexity of the object detection network. By dividing the video into scenes, object detection is performed for the first frame image of each scene to obtain the first bounding box. Object tracking is performed for the next sequential frame image until a scene change is detected. Third, the image is resized in the horizontal direction to alter the aspect ratio of the image and obtain the 1D RoIs of the image by projecting bounding boxes in the vertical direction. Then, the proposed method computes the grid map from the 1D RoIs to calculate new coordinates of each column data of the image. Finally, the retargeted video is obtained by rearranging all retargeted frame images. Comparative experiments conducted with various benchmark methods show an average bidirectional similarity score of 1.92, which is higher than other conventional methods. The proposed method was stable and satisfied viewers without causing cognitive discomfort as conventional methods.
Recently, high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction based on the multiple exposure stack from a given single exposure utilizes a deep learning framework to generate high-quality HDR images. These conventional networks focus on the exposure transfer task to reconstruct the multi-exposure stack. Therefore, they often fail to fuse the multi-exposure stack into a perceptually pleasant HDR image as the inversion artifacts occur. We tackle the problem in stack reconstruction-based methods by proposing a novel framework with a fully differentiable high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) process. By explicitly using the loss, which compares the network's output with the ground truth HDR image, our framework enables a neural network that generates the multiple exposure stack for HDRI to train stably. In other words, our differentiable HDR synthesis layer helps the deep neural network to train to create multi-exposure stacks while reflecting the precise correlations between multi-exposure images in the HDRI process. In addition, our network uses the image decomposition and the recursive process to facilitate the exposure transfer task and to adaptively respond to recursion frequency. The experimental results show that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative results in terms of both the exposure transfer tasks and the whole HDRI process.
In this paper, we propose a neural network-based image restoration method for reconstructing a single tone-mapped high dynamic range image (which has higher colorreproduction rate and detail preservation than a low dynamic range image) from a single low dynamic range image, including over- and under-exposed images. Specifically, the proposed method aims to solve the problem of restoring detail information for the clipped area, in addition to the problem of restoring color information from existing over- and under-exposed images. The proposed method uses a mask and a mask-applied neural network to distinguish between clipped and non-clipped regions. In addition, it restores the clipped region based on image inpainting, and restores the non-clipped region based on image-to-image translation. The proposed method showed higher color and detail restoration for the clipped region within a certain size, compared to conventional methods, despite the relatively small number of neural network parameters. In addition, the Fréchet inception distance score and qualitative results showed that the proposed method restores the clipped region naturally without degrading the perceptual quality, compared to other methods.
Recently, high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction based on the multiple exposure stack from a given single exposure utilizes a deep learning framework to generate high-quality HDR images. These conventional networks focus on the exposure transfer task to reconstruct the multi-exposure stack. Therefore, they often fail to fuse the multi-exposure stack into a perceptually pleasant HDR image as the inversion artifacts occur. We tackle the problem in stack reconstruction-based methods by proposing a novel framework with a fully differentiable high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) process. By explicitly using the loss, which compares the network's output with the ground truth HDR image, our framework enables a neural network that generates the multiple exposure stack for HDRI to train stably. In other words, our differentiable HDR synthesis layer helps the deep neural network to train to create multi-exposure stacks while reflecting the precise correlations between multi-exposure images in the HDRI process. In addition, our network uses the image decomposition and the recursive process to facilitate the exposure transfer task and to adaptively respond to recursion frequency. The experimental results show that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative results in terms of both the exposure transfer tasks and the whole HDRI process.