High-quality brightness enhancement functions for real-time reverse tone mapping

Abstract

This paper presents an automatic technique for producing high-quality brightness-enhancement functions for real-time reverse tone mapping of images and videos. Our approach uses a bilateral filter to obtain smooth results while preserving sharp luminance discontinuities, and can be efficiently implemented on GPUs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by reverse tone mapping several images and videos. Experiments based on HDR visible difference predicator and on an image distortion metric indicate that the results produced by our method are less prone to visible artifacts than the ones obtained with the state-of-the-art technique for real-time automatic computation of brightness enhancement functions.