High dynamic range compression by half quadratic regularization

This paper presents a new adaptive tone mapping for high dynamic range (HDR) images. In the proposed scheme, the luminance of an HDR image is decomposed into a base layer with large gradients and a detail layer with small gradients by using an adaptive half quadratic regularization method. The base layer is compressed by a novel global mapping to reduce the dynamic range while the detail layer can be amplified to enhance the local contrasts. With the proposed scheme, the generated low dynamic range (LDR) images look more natural and local details are also preserved very well.