Fast multi-exposure image fusion with median filter and recursive filter

• Published in: IEEE transactions on consumer electronics Vol. 58; no. 2; pp. 626 - 632
• Main Authors: Li, Shutao, Kang, Xudong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2012; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Brightness; Cameras; Color; dynamic scene; Electronics; Equalization; Filtering; Histograms; Image color analysis; Image contrast; Image fusion; Image sequences; median filter; Motion detection; Multi-exposure; Recursive; recursive filter; Studies
• ISSN: 0098-3063; 1558-4127
• DOI: 10.1109/TCE.2012.6227469

This paper proposes a weighted sum based multi-exposure image fusion method which consists of two main steps: three image features composed of local contrast, brightness and color dissimilarity are first measured to estimate the weight maps refined by recursive filtering. Then, the fused image is constructed by weighted sum of source images. The main advantage of the proposed method lies in a recursive filter based weight map refinement step which is able to obtain accurate weight maps for image fusion. Another advantage is that a novel histogram equalization and median filter based motion detection method is proposed for fusing multi-exposure images in dynamic scenes which contain motion objects. Furthermore, the proposed method is quite fast and thus can be directly used for most consumer cameras. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of subjective and objective evaluation.