A Hybrid l1-l0 Layer Decomposition Model for Tone Mapping

Tone mapping aims to reproduce a standard dynamic range image from a high dynamic range image with visual information preserved. State-of-the-art tone mapping algorithms mostly decompose an image into a base layer and a detail layer, and process them accordingly. These methods may have problems of halo artifacts and over-enhancement, due to the lack of proper priors imposed on the two layers. In this paper, we propose a hybrid ℓ
₁
-ℓ
₀
decomposition model to address these problems. Specifically, an ℓ
₁
sparsity term is imposed on the base layer to model its piecewise smoothness property. An ℓ
₀
sparsity term is imposed on the detail layer as a structural prior, which leads to piecewise constant effect. We further propose a multiscale tone mapping scheme based on our layer decomposition model. Experiments show that our tone mapping algorithm achieves visually compelling results with little halo artifacts, outperforming the state-of-the-art tone mapping algorithms in both subjective and objective evaluations.