Efficient image retargeting for high dynamic range scenes

Most of the real world scenes have a very high dynamic range (HDR). The mobile phone cameras and the digital cameras available in market are limited in their capability in both the range and spatial resolutions. Same argument can be posed about the limited dynamic range of display devices which further differ in spatial resolution and aspect ratio. In this paper, we address the problem of displaying the high contrast low dynamic range (LDR) image of a HDR scene in a display device which has different spatial resolution compared to that of the capturing device. We want to achieve this task while preserving the salient scene contents. The solution proposed in this work can be employed with any camera which has the ability to shoot multiple differently exposed images of a scene. Further, the proposed solutions provide the flexibility in the depiction of entire contrast of the HDR scene as an LDR image with user specified spatial resolution. This task is achieved through an optimized content aware retargeting framework which preserves the salient features apart from a novel algorithm to fuse multi-exposure images. We show that the proposed approach performs exceedingly well in the generation of high contrast LDR image of varying spatial resolutions.