Strong ghost removal in multi-exposure image fusion using hole-filling with exposure congruency

Abstract

It is the most crucial problem to remove ghost in the multi-exposure image fusion of dynamic scene. The traditional fusion methods have good effects to remove weak ghosts. However, they cannot effectively remove strong ghosts. This paper proposes a new strong ghost removal method in multi-exposure image fusion using hole-filling with exposure congruency. First, analyzing the characteristics of strong ghosts, a detection scheme for strong ghost regions is designed by combining histogram matching and exposure difference detection. Subsequently, to effectively extract image local features, a multi-scale fusion network for non-strong ghost regions is designed to obtain a pre-fused image. Further, based on the distribution characteristics of strong ghosts, a hole-filling model with exposure congruency is designed to remove the strong ghosts. Experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method can obtain better performance in both of subjective and objective evaluation, particularly in terms of effectively removing strong ghosts.