Lightweight Attention-Guided Network with Frequency Domain Reconstruction for High Dynamic Range Image Fusion

Multi-exposure high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction, the task of reconstructing an HDR image from multiple low dynamic range (LDR) images in a dynamic scene, often produces ghosting artifacts caused by camera motion and moving objects and also cannot deal with washed-out regions due to over or under-exposures. While there has been many deep-learning-based methods with motion estimation to alleviate these problems, they still have limitations for severely moving scenes. They also require large parameter counts, especially in the case of state-of-the-art methods that employ attention modules. To address these issues, we propose a frequency domain approach based on the idea that the transform domain coefficients inherently involve the global information from whole image pixels to cope with large motions. Specifically we adopt Residual Fast Fourier Transform (RFFT) blocks, which allows for global interactions of pixels. Moreover, we also employ Depthwise Overparametrized convolution (DO-conv) blocks, a convolution in which each input channel is convolved with its own 2D kernel, for faster convergence and performance gains. We call this LFFNet (Lightweight Frequency Fusion Network), and experiments on the benchmarks show reduced ghosting artifacts and improved performance up to 0.6dB tonemapped PSNR compared to recent state-of-the-art methods. Our architecture also requires fewer parameters and converges faster in training.