Locally Non-rigid Registration for Mobile HDR Photography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, mobile-friendly image registration method for HDR photography that effectively prevents artifacts caused by camera motion and scene changes, enabling high-quality results on portable devices.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, extremely fast registration technique tailored for mobile HDR imaging that balances accuracy and speed, outperforming existing methods in real-time applications.

Findings

Registration under 700ms on a tablet for 5MP images

Prevents artifacts caused by motion and scene changes

Achieves high-quality HDR composites in real-time

Abstract

Image registration for stack-based HDR photography is challenging. If not properly accounted for, camera motion and scene changes result in artifacts in the composite image. Unfortunately, existing methods to address this problem are either accurate, but too slow for mobile devices, or fast, but prone to failing. We propose a method that fills this void: our approach is extremely fast---under 700ms on a commercial tablet for a pair of 5MP images---and prevents the artifacts that arise from insufficient registration quality.