Abstract
As the high dynamic range displays becoming the future trend, the need for HDR videos increases. However, most videos nowadays are the legacy low dynamic range (LDR) videos. In order to meet this trend, we proposed a region-based enhancement of the pseudo-exposures to generate a HDR video out of an existing LDR video. By the generation of pseudo-multiple-exposure images and the fusion of different regions with clear details, we can get a high-quality HDR video sequence. We also proposed a specular map to further enhance the high-luminance areas by interpolate with the darkest pseudo-exposure image. We compare our method with other inverse tone mapping operators, and several evaluations show that our method has a more stable performance in HDR luminance and avoids flickering artifacts. Also, our proposed method is able to generate visually high quality HDR videos with a small amount of time, which could be shown in the smallest value of overall contrast change comparing to the reference images. The generation of our specular map is 78x faster than Rempel et al.’s expand map and 286x faster than Banterle et al.’s map.