Exposure bracketing via automatic exposure selection

Exposure bracketing is widely used to generate high dynamic range (HDR) images. Exposure bracketing often consists of an image taken by the auto-exposure setting of a camera as well as two other images taken at ±n exposure levels away from the auto-exposure setting where n is manually selected or specified. The images in the bracket are then blended to generate an HDR image. This paper presents an automatic exposure selection method that relieves the user from setting the exposure level, thus allowing HDR images to be generated with no user intervention. This is achieved by using the camera characteristics function and the scene information. The results obtained indicate the HDR images generated by using this method outperform the manual selection of exposure level in terms of two widely used image quality measures.