Robust ghost-free high-dynamic-range imaging by visual salience based bilateral motion detection and stack extension based exposure fusion

High-dynamic-range imaging (HDRI) technologies aim to extend the dynamic range of luminance against the limitation of camera sensors. Irradiance information of a scene can be reconstructed by fusing multiple low-dynamic-range (LDR) images with different exposures. The key issue is removing ghost artifacts caused by motion of moving objects and handheld cameras. This paper proposes a robust ghost-free HDRI algorithm by visual salience based bilateral motion detection and stack extension based exposure fusion. For ghost areas detection, visual salience is introduced to measure the differences between multiple images; bilateral motion detection is employed to improve the accuracy of labeling motion areas. For exposure fusion, the proposed algorithm reduces the discontinuity of brightness by stack extension and rejects the information of ghost areas to avoid artifacts via fusion masks. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can remove ghost artifacts accurately for both static and handheld cameras, remain robust to scenes with complex motion and keep low complexity over recent advances including rank minimization based method and patch based method by 63.6% and 20.4% time savings averagely.