High dynamic range image hallucination

Abstract

We introduce high dynamic range image hallucination for adding high dynamic range details to the over-exposed and under-exposed regions of a low dynamic range image. Our method is based on a simple assumption: there exist high quality patches in the image with similar textures as the regions that are over or under exposed. Hence, we can add high dynamic range details to a region by simply transferring texture details from another patch that may be under different illumination levels. In our approach, a user only needs to annotate the image with a few strokes to indicate textures that can be applied to the corresponding under-exposed or over-exposed regions, and these regions are automatically hallucinated by our algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that our simple, yet effective approach is able to significantly increase the amount of texture details in a wide range of common scenarios, with a modest amount of user interaction.