Feature-based multiexposure image-sequence fusion with guided filter and image alignment

Abstract

Multiexposure fusion images have a higher dynamic range and reveal more details than a single captured image of a real-world scene. A clear and intuitive feature-based fusion technique for multiexposure image sequences is conceptually proposed. The main idea of the proposed method is to combine three image features [phase congruency (PC), local contrast, and color saturation] to obtain weight maps of the images. Then, the weight maps are further refined using a guided filter which can improve their accuracy. The final fusion result is constructed using the weighted sum of the source image sequence. In addition, for multiexposure image-sequence fusion involving dynamic scenes containing moving objects, ghost artifacts can easily occur if fusion is directly performed. Therefore, an image-alignment method is first used to adjust the input images to correspond to a reference image, after which fusion is performed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a superior performance compared to the existing methods.