A multi-exposure image fusion algorithm without ghost effect

This paper proposes a new multi-exposure fusion algorithm for HDR imaging. The advantage of the fusion based method is that it does not actually generate HDR images so that the compression to LDR is also not needed. However, the conventional exposure fusion suffers from ghost effects when there are moving object or hand trembling because the out put is just a weighted sum of multiple exposure input images. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose two kinds of weights in addition to the conventional weights that reflect the contrast, saturation and well-exposedness. The first is the weight that removes the pixels that can cause ghost effects, based on the observation that pixels near the boundary of moving objects often violate the rule that more highly exposed pixel have higher intensity level. The second is to reduce the weight when the correlation between an exposed image and the reference image is low. Experimental results show that the proposed method removes the ghost effectively, and yield less artifacts than the conventional methods.