Detecting and composing near-identical HDR images without exposure information

In high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, two essential problems are to compose HDR image from conventional image set without any prior information about their exposures, and to access the synthesis result. To solve these problems, we first develop an exposure ratio estimation algorithm based on intensity mapping function (IMF). Then, we introduce an HDR image comparison method to verify whether two HDR images are from the same scene by using their log histogram similarity. Even though the images carrying the same information, their similarity cannot be detected by pixel-wise comparisons. We name such a pair of HDR images as near-identical images. According to experiments, our detection method is able to identify near-identical HDR images effectively, and our synthesis algorithm is able to recover the correct exposure ratios and compose near-identical HDR images.