Noise-Insensitive Contrast Enhancement for Rendering High-Dynamic-Range Images

The process of compressing the high luminance values into the displayable range inevitably incurs the loss of image contrasts. Although the local adaptation process, such as the two-scale contrast reduction scheme, is capable of preserving details during the HDR compression process, it cannot be used to enhance the local contrasts of image contents. Moreover, the effect of noise artifacts cannot be eliminated when the detail manipulation is subsequently performed. We propose a new tone reproduction scheme, which incorporates the local contrast enhancement and the noise suppression processes, for the display of HDR images. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme is indeed effective in enhancing local contrasts of image contents and suppressing noise artifacts during the increase of the visibility of HDR scenes.