US 8,570,396 B2 · Multiple exposure high dynamic range image capture

Abstract

Techniques for creating a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image within a consumer grade digital camera from a series of images of a scene captured at different exposure levels, and displaying the HDR image on the camera's built-in display are provided. The approach employs mixing images of the series to incorporate both scene shadow and highlight details, and the removing of “ghost” image artifacts appearing in the mixed HDR image resulting from movement in the scene over the time the series images are captured. The low computational resource utilization of the image mixing and ghost removal processing operations, along with the ability to commence image mixing and ghost removal prior to the acquisition of all series images, can significantly reduce the time required to generate and display a tone mapped HDR image.

Claims8

Dependent claims

A method for detecting local motion between a reference image and a plurality of comparison images, comprising:

defining a number of luma thresholds that determine a group of reference image luma value ranges in which a particular comparison image is selected, the number corresponding to the number of comparison images;
defining a difference threshold function that sets threshold values according to luma values of the reference image;
for each particular comparison image, producing an intermediate detection map denoting local motion between the reference image and the particular comparison image by applying the threshold values on a difference image formed by comparing the reference image and the particular comparison image, wherein the intermediate detection map is based on pixels within a reference image luma value range that corresponds to the particular comparison image;
and
outputting a final detection map that is a union of the intermediate detection maps.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Multiple exposure high dynamic range image capture

Life of this patent

Multiple exposure high dynamic range image capture

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims8