A high-dynamic range CMOS camera based on dual-gain channels

To overcome the ghosting phenomenon of multi-exposure technology, a new high-dynamic range (HDR) image processing method is proposed in this paper, which combines the features from dual-gain channel images. Further, a complete CMOS camera based on the HDR method is implemented, which produces a real-time HDR live video streams. This camera can capture the details of bright and dark areas in the scene completely with an extended dynamic range up to 95 dB. An ALTERA FPGA is the core processing unit of the entire camera, and it completes all the functional modules of the camera efficiently, including dual-channel video capture, image caching, HDR synthesis and tone mapping. Finally, the real-time HDR video flow has a display resolution of 1920 × 1080 and a frame rate of 60 fps.