• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.73-80
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• 2012

Recent research efforts have focused on combining high dynamic range imaging with super-resolution reconstruction to enhance both the intensity range and resolution of images. The processes developed to date start with a set of multiple-exposure input images with low dynamic range (LDR) and low resolution (LR), and require several procedural steps: conversion from LDR to HDR, SR reconstruction, and tone mapping. Input images captured with irregular exposure steps have an impact on the quality of the output images from this process. In this paper, we present a simplified framework to replace the separate procedures of previous methods that is also robust to different sets of input images. The proposed method first calculates weight maps to determine the best visible parts of the input images. The weight maps are then applied directly to SR reconstruction, and the best visible parts for the dark and highlighted areas of each input image are preserved without LDR-to-HDR conversion, resulting in high dynamic range. A new luminance control factor (LCF) is used during SR reconstruction to adjust the luminance of input images captured during irregular exposure steps and ensure acceptable luminance of the resulting output images. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces SR images of HDR quality with luminance compensation.