A Novel Tone Mapping Method for High Dynamic Range Image by Incorporating Edge-Preserving Filter Into Method Based on Retinex

A tone mapping method for high dynamic range image is proposed to prevent the halo artifacts, which is easy to be produced in traditional method based on the Retinex theory in handling high dynamic range(HDR) image. Our method is based on the Retinex theory. The novelties of our method is first to employ a local edge-preserving filter for the estimation of the illumination, which can smooth out the small-scale details while the large-scale edges are retained. Second, the filter is incorporated into the method based on MSR algorithm, in which the Gaussian filter is replaced by this filter in order to prevent the halo artifacts and a multi-scale operation is applied for preserving more details. Finally, a post-processing step is adopted to compress the dynamic range and prevent the underexposure or overexposure. We tested our method on a variety of HDR images and compared it with other typical methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method can not only prevent the halo artifacts, but also can get higher contrast and more clearly details.