Efficient Image Retargeting for High Dynamic Range Scenes

TL;DR

This paper presents an optimized content-aware retargeting framework for converting HDR scenes into high contrast LDR images suitable for displays with different resolutions, preserving salient features and effectively combining multi-exposure images.

Contribution

It introduces a novel content-aware retargeting method that efficiently handles HDR to LDR conversion with resolution adaptation, improving over existing approaches.

Findings

The proposed method preserves salient features effectively.

It outperforms alternative approaches in generating high contrast LDR images.

The framework is flexible for different display resolutions.

Abstract

Most of the real world scenes have a very high dynamic range (HDR). The mobile phone cameras and the digital cameras available in markets are limited in their capability in both the range and spatial resolution. Same argument can be posed about the limited dynamic range display devices which also differ in the spatial resolution and aspect ratios. In this paper, we address the problem of displaying the high contrast low dynamic range (LDR) image of a HDR scene in a display device which has different spatial resolution compared to that of the capturing digital camera. The optimal solution proposed in this work can be employed with any camera which has the ability to shoot multiple differently exposed images of a scene. Further, the proposed solutions provide the flexibility in the depiction of entire contrast of the HDR scene as a LDR image with an user specified spatial resolution. This task is achieved through an optimized content aware retargeting framework which preserves salient features along with the algorithm to combine multi-exposure images. We show the proposed approach performs exceedingly well in the generation of high contrast LDR image of varying spatial resolution compared to an alternate approach.