Detail-preserving fidelity refinement for tone mapping

Abstract

Tone mapping can compress the color range of HDR (high dynamic range) image to produce its LDR (low dynamic range) image. However, without preserving the original scene detail, tone mapping may produce various artifacts and their fidelity will be severely decreased. In this paper, we propose a new detail-preserving refinement method to efficiently improve the fidelity of tone mapping. Its overall flow includes the four key steps: tone initialization, detail extraction, tone reconstruction, and detail restoration. First of all, we employ clustering and decomposition to obtain initial tone layer and detail map. Then we construct detail affinity and gradient guidance to optimize the detail map and reconstruct the new tone layer. Finally, we combine them to produce a high-fidelity result of tone mapping. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through a number of experiments in visual comparison, and verify its high-efficiency performance in execution time.