Noise and dynamic range optimal computational imaging

Computational photography techniques overcome limitations of traditional image sensors such as dynamic range and noise. Many computational imaging techniques have been proposed that process image stacks acquired using different exposure, aperture or gain settings, but far less attention has been paid to determining the parameters of the stack automatically. In this paper, we propose a novel computational imaging system that automatically and efficiently computes the optimal number of shots and corresponding exposure times and gains, taking into account characteristics of the scene and sensor. Our technique seamlessly integrates the use of multiple capture for both High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging and denoising. The acquired images are then aligned, warped and merged in the raw Bayer domain according to a statistical noise model of the sensor to produce an optimal, potentially HDR and denoised image. The result is a fully automatic camera that constantly monitors the scene in front of it and decides how many images are required to capture it, without requiring the user to explicitly switch between different capture modalities.