HDR Video Reconstruction: A Coarse-to-fine Network and A Real-world Benchmark Dataset
Guanying Chen1,2     Chaofeng Chen1     Shi Guo2,3     Zhetong Liang2,3
Kwan-Yee K. Wong1     Lei Zhang2,3    
1The University of Hong Kong     2DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group
3The Hong Kong Polytechnic University  

Code [PyTorch]     Dataset     Paper [ICCV 2021]     Supplementary [PDF]     Poster    


Abstract

High dynamic range (HDR) video reconstruction from sequences captured with alternating exposures is a very challenging problem. Existing methods often align low dynamic range (LDR) input sequence in the image space using optical flow, and then merge the aligned images to produce HDR output. However, accurate alignment and fusion in the image space are difficult due to the missing details in the over-exposed regions and noise in the under-exposed regions, resulting in unpleasing ghosting artifacts. To enable more accurate alignment and HDR fusion, we introduce a coarse-to-fine deep learning framework for HDR video reconstruction. Firstly, we perform coarse alignment and pixel blending in the image space to estimate the coarse HDR video. Secondly, we conduct more sophisticated alignment and temporal fusion in the feature space of the coarse HDR video to produce better reconstruction. Considering the fact that there is no publicly available dataset for quantitative and comprehensive evaluation of HDR video reconstruction methods, we collect such a benchmark dataset, which contains 97 sequences of static scenes and 184 testing pairs of dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.


Method


Network architecture of the proposed coarse-to-fine framework for videos captured with two alternating exposures.

Introduction Video (5 mins)



Experimental Results

1. Quantitative Results on Real Dataset

2. Visual comparison on Kalantari13 dataset.



Code and Dataset

Code and models are available at https://github.com/guanyingc/DeepHDRVideo.
Dataset are available at https://guanyingc.github.io/DeepHDRVideo-Dataset/.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Hong Kong RGC RIF grant (R5001-18) and Hong Kong RGC GRF grant (project# 17203119).

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