Attention-based high dynamic range imaging

Abstract

Many tone mapping algorithms have been proposed based on the studies in Human Visual System; however, they rarely addressed the effects of attention to contrast response. As attention plays an important role in human visual system, we proposed a local tone mapping method that respects both attention and adaptation effects. We adopt the High Dynamic Range (HDR) saliency map to compute an attention map, which predicts the attentive regions and nonattentative regions in an HDR image. The attention map is then used to locally adjust the contrast of the HDR image according to attention and adaptation models found in psychophysics. We applied our tone mapping approach to HDR images and videos and compared with the results generated by three state-of-the-art tone mapping algorithms. Our experiments show that our approach produces results with better image quality in terms of preserving details and chromaticity of visual saliency.