Title: Generation of High Dynamic Range Illumination from a Single Image for the Enhancement of Undesirably Illuminated Images,
Abstract: This paper presents an algorithm that enhances undesirably illuminated images
by generating and fusing multi-level illuminations from a single image.The
input image is first decomposed into illumination and reflectance components by
using an edge-preserving smoothing filter. Then the reflectance component is
scaled up to improve the image details in bright areas. The illumination
component is scaled up and down to generate several illumination images that
correspond to certain camera exposure values different from the original. The
virtual multi-exposure illuminations are blended into an enhanced illumination,
where we also propose a method to generate appropriate weight maps for the tone
fusion. Finally, an enhanced image is obtained by multiplying the equalized
illumination and enhanced reflectance. Experiments show that the proposed
algorithm produces visually pleasing output and also yields comparable
objective results to the conventional enhancement methods, while requiring
modest computational loads.