High dynamic range imaging method and apparatus

A high dynamic range imaging apparatus, comprising:

• an image acquisition unit configured to acquire a first low dynamic range (LDR) image, a second LDR image, and a third LDR image having different exposure values;
• a weight map estimation unit configured to apply the first, second, and third LDR images to a weight map estimation model to extract a weight map, and integrate the first, second, and third LDR images using the extracted weight map to generate an input feature map;
• and
• an HDR generation unit configured to apply the input feature map to a Swin-Fourier convolution network model to perform Fourier transform and convolution on the input feature map, and then connect a reference feature map to generate a high dynamic range (HDR) image,
• wherein the weight map estimation unit applies the first, second, and third LDR images to a convolution layer of the weight map estimation model to extract a first feature map, a second feature map, and a third feature map, respectively,
• applies the first feature map and the second feature map to a first attention module of the weight map estimation model to generate a first weight map, and applies the third feature map and the second feature map to a second attention module of the weight map estimation model to generate a second weight map, and
• generates the input feature map by reflecting the first weight map and the second weight map in the first feature map and the third feature map, respectively, and then combining the first weight map and the second weight map with the second feature map,
• wherein the reference feature map is a feature map of the second LDR image extracted by the weight map estimation model.