Deep Learning Strategies for Addressing Anomalous Exposure in Image Processing: The FARDBUNet Approach

In real-world scenarios, capturing scenes with excessive dynamic range often leads to the partial loss of highlight or dark area information due to irradiance variations and limitations in the capture capabilities of imaging devices caused by their size and material constraints. This phenomenon gives rise to anomalous exposure problems and triggers the loss of crucial initial details, thereby becoming a significant obstacle to achieving high image quality. Despite numerous researchers' integration of exposure compensation techniques into the imaging process, the anomalous exposure problem remains unsolved, hindering progress in image processing. Consequently, considerable research is valuable in implementing exposure calibration techniques on visual perception and multimedia devices. This dissertation proposes FARDBUNet, a novel end-to-end exposure calibration model designed to address the anomalous exposure problem. A key innovation of FARDBUNet is the incorporation of a fused attention mechanism, enabling the model to prioritize regions needing enhanced correction while accounting for the global exposure characteristics of the image. Additionally, to tackle the challenge of inadequate information availability in the localized areas due to exposure issues, we introduce an atrous residual dense block that efficiently captures local information by expanding the receptive field. Comprehensive tests validate the effectiveness of our suggested model, which performs on par with leading techniques on expansive exposure datasets.