Up to now, a number of tone mapping methods have been proposed through a lot of literatures to reduce halos and to overcome loss of detailed information in a given high dynamic range image (HDRI) while reproducing colors. In these efforts, there are a wide variety of tone mapping techniques including global tone mapping technique, local tone mapping technique, and a combination of both techniques. However, there are still unsolved challenges such as halos, loss of detailed information, and color distortion like luminance shift and hue shift in the consequence of performing the conventional tone mapping methods. Accordingly, this article presents a novel approach to solving these problems by combining the modified guided filter method and the Total Variation (TV)-based restoration model, thereby comprising the proposed tone mapping operator. The main purpose of combining both is to decompose the HDRI into the base layer (illumination components) and the detail layer (reflectance components), which offers several advantages: removing noise and representing detailed information in resulting images. Adaptive gamma correction is also adopted to effectively reduce luminance shift and hue shift by automatically controlling the dynamic range, parameter free. The chromatic adaptation transform is then used to address the mismatch between displayed images and real-life scenes based on the human visual perception (HVP). The main contribution of the proposed approach is to overcome halos and loss of detailed information arising from the local tone mapping technique or the global tone mapping one. The experimental results show that the proposed tone mapping method yields better performance over the conventional method in subjective and quantitative qualities and color reproduction.
Ho-Hyoung Choi, Hyun-Soo Kang, "Tone Mapping for High Dynamic Range Image Using Modified Guided Filter and TV-based Restoration Model" in Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 2018, pp 060501-1 - 060501-14, https://doi.org/10.2352/J.ImagingSci.Technol.2018.62.6.060501