SATURATED REGION RECOVERY IN TONE-MAPPED HDR IMAGES

Abstract

Tone-mapping is one of the prevailing methods to overcome high dynamic range imaging limitations over low dynamic range display devices, but the tone-mapped output image may suffer from saturated regions with texture and color information loss. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to solve the so-called clipping problem in tone-mapped high dynamic range images. A successful saturation correction framework, which relies on linear embeddings, difference of pixel intensities and gradient-guided block-search, is developed as a post-processing technique to tone-mapping. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully recovers clipped regions for the saturation problem in tone-mapped output images while avoiding artifacts.