Dynamic Range Improvement Through Multiple Exposures

This paper presents an approach for improving the effective dynamic range of cameras by using multiple photographs of the same scene taken with different exposure times. Using this method enables the photographer to accurately capture scenes that contain a high dynamic range, i.e., scenes that have both very bright and very dark regions. The approach requires an initial calibration, where the camera response function is determined. Once the response function for a camera is known, high dynamic range images can be computed easily. The high dynamic range output image consists of a weighted average of the multiply-exposed input images, and thus contains information captured by each of the input images. From a computational standpoint, the proposed algorithm is very efficient, and requires little processing time to determine a solution.