High quality video in high dynamic range scenes from interlaced dual-ISO footage

Abstract

Comunicació presentada al IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging, celebrat del 14 al 18 de febrer de 2016 a San Francisco (CA, USA) i organitzat per la Society for Imaging Science and Technology.

In this paper we present a simple and affordable method to generate high quality video from a high dynamic range scene. It is performed without utilizing extra lighting, neither alternating exposures, nor operating with dual-camera set-ups. Our input is an interlaced video alternating row pairs with different ISO values, as some DSLR camera models can provide. The proposed algorithm involves two main steps: first the computation of two single-ISO full-frame images (one for each ISO value) using an inpainting-based deinterlacing method, followed by their combination into a single frame by a weighted average. This results in a high dynamic range frame, containing all the details in bright and dark areas at the same time, that is finally tone-mapped into a low dynamic range frame for display purposes. Current results show this is a practical and cost-effective method that produces outputs free of ghosting artifacts and with very little noise.

This work was supported by the European Research Council, Starting Grant ref. 306337, by the Spanish government, grant ref. TIN2012-38112, and by the Icrea Academia Award.