Benchmarking and comparing multi-exposure image fusion algorithms

Abstract

Multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) is an important area in computer vision and has attracted increasing interests in recent years. Apart from conventional algorithms, deep learning techniques have also been applied to MEF. However, although many efforts have been made on developing MEF algorithms, the lack of benchmarking studies makes it difficult to perform fair and comprehensive performance comparison among MEF algorithms, thus hindering the development of this field significantly. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing a benchmark of multi-exposure image fusion (MEFB), which consists of a test set of 100 image pairs, a code library of 21 algorithms, 20 evaluation metrics, 2100 fused images, and a software toolkit. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmarking study in the field of MEF. This paper also gives a literature review on MEF methods with a focus on deep learning-based algorithms. Extensive experiments have been conducted using MEFB for comprehensive performance evaluation and for identifying effective algorithms. We expect that MEFB will serve as an effective platform for researchers to compare the performance of MEF algorithms.