Single-Shot HDR Recovery via a Video Diffusion Prior

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, interpretable method for single-shot HDR image reconstruction by finetuning a video diffusion model to generate exposure brackets conditioned on an LDR input, then fusing them into a high-fidelity HDR image.

Contribution

It reformulates HDR reconstruction as conditional video generation and fusion, eliminating the need for multiple models and improving fidelity and interpretability.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art generative methods on benchmarks

Achieves higher human preference in pairwise comparisons

Extends framework to other image reconstruction tasks

Abstract

Recent generative methods for single-shot high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction show promising results, but often struggle with preserving fidelity to the input image. They require separate models to handle highlights and shadows, or sacrifice interpretability by directly predicting the final HDR image. We address these limitations by re-casting single-shot HDR reconstruction as conditional video generation and fusing the generated frames into an HDR image. We finetune a video diffusion model to generate an exposure bracket, conditioned on a low dynamic range (LDR) input. We fuse this image bracket using per-pixel weights predicted by a light-weight UNet. This formulation is simple, interpretable, and effective. Rather than directly hallucinating an HDR image, it explicitly reconstructs the intermediate exposure stack and fuses it into the final output. Our method eliminates the need for separate models across exposure regimes and produces HDR reconstructions with high input fidelity. On quantitative benchmarks, we outperform state-of-the-art generative baselines with comparable model capacity on several reconstruction metrics. Human evaluators further prefer our results in 72% of pairwise comparisons against existing methods. Finally, we show that this input-conditioned sequence generation and fusion framework extends beyond HDR to other image reconstruction tasks, such as all-in-focus image recovery from a single defocus-blurred input.