Single image HDR synthesis using a Densely Connected Dilated ConvNet

Visual representations using high dynamic range (HDR) images have become increasingly popular because of their high quality and expressive ability. HDR images are expected to be used in a broad range of applications, including digital cinema, photography, and broadcast. The generation of a HDR image from a single exposure Low Dynamic Range (LDR) image is a challenging task where one must make up for missing data due to underexposure or overexposure and color quantization. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model with a stack of dilated convolutional blocks for reconstructing a HDR image from a single LDR image. Within each dilation block, the dilation rate of the convolution layer is three and progressively decreases to one. Multiple dilation convolution blocks are further connected densely to improve the representation capacity of the network. As the network is trained in a supervised manner, the additional information is reconstructed from learned features. Our experimental results show that the model effectively captures missing information that was lost from the original image.