Multi‐exposure image fusion technique using multi‐resolution blending

Abstract

This study proposes a multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) technique that takes multi-exposure input images and produces a high-quality output image without any artefacts. The proposed technique consists of four steps. In the first step, three quality measures (contrast, saturation, and well exposedness) are measured. Secondly, the colour dissimilarity approach is used to detect moving objects. Thirdly, the authors calculate the weight maps using three quality measures (contrast, saturation, and well exposedness) and colour dissimilarity feature. Finally, the fused image is generated using the multi-resolution blending utilising pyramid decomposition. The vital advantage of the proposed technique is that it blends the multi-exposure images very well and avoids the seams effectively. The method can be used for consumer cameras as the presented technique is quite fast. Experimental results prove that the proposed method produces high dynamic range images without ghost artefacts. Furthermore, the comparison, objectively and subjectively, of the proposed technique in terms of mutual information, MEF structural similarity index, and natural image quality evaluator, with state-of-the-art techniques, shows significant improvement of the proposed scheme over existing techniques.