Multi-Scale Exposure Fusion via Content Adaptive Edge-Preserving Smoothing Pyramids

Multi-scale exposure fusion (MEF) is an efficient way to fuse differently exposed low dynamic range (LDR) images of a high dynamic range (HDR) scene into an information enriched LDR image. In this paper, a new MEF algorithm is proposed to merge the differently exposed LDR images by introducing novel content adaptive edge-preserving smoothing (CAS) pyramids for the weight maps of all the LDR images. With the proposed CAS pyramids, details in the brightest and darkest regions of the HDR scene are preserved better than existing MEF algorithms on top of the Gaussian pyramids and edge-preserving smoothing pyramids. Comparisons experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to nine state-of-the-art MEF algorithms from both subjective and objective points of view regardless the image sizes.