High Dynamic Range Imaging with Multi-Exposure Binning on Quad Bayer Color Filter Array

This paper presents a high dynamic range (HDR) imaging method using multi-exposure (ME) binning on a multi-exposure Quad Bayer color filter array (MEQB-CFA). In order to save power consumption aggressively, image sensors for modern smartphones provide an operation to read raw data directly at a reduced resolution, called binning. Despite its high practical demand, such an operation has not been discussed in previous works of HDR imaging. Our ME binning is an extension of the binning for HDR imaging and can be justified under the assumption of locally-homogeneous radiance. We also implement the HDR imaging process after ME binning using a deep neural network. Experiments show outstanding efficiency and competitive imaging quality as compared with a state-of-the-art HDR imaging method.