An Approach to Improve the Contrast of Multi Scale Fusion Methods

Various approaches have been proposed to convert low dynamic range (LDR) to high dynamic range (HDR). Of these approaches, the Multi Scale Fusion (MSF) algorithm based on Laplacian pyramid decomposition is used in many applications and demonstrates its usefulness. However, the pyramid fusion technique has no means for controlling the luminance component because the total number of pixels decreases as the pyramid rises to the upper layer. In this paper, we extract the reflection light of the image based on the Retinex theory and generate the weight map by adjusting the reflection component. This weighting map is applied to achieve an MSF-like effect during image fusion and provides an opportunity to control the brightness components. Experimental results show that the proposed method maintains the total number of pixels and exhibits similar effects to the conventional method.