This paper proposes the first non-flow-based deep framework for high dynamic range (HDR) imaging of dynamic scenes with large-scale foreground motions. In state-of-the-art deep HDR imaging, input images are first aligned using optical flows before merging, which are still error-prone due to occlusion and large motions. In stark contrast to flow-based methods, we formulate HDR imaging as an image translation problem without optical flows. Moreover, our simple translation network can automatically hallucinate plausible HDR details in the presence of total occlusion, saturation and under-exposure, which are otherwise almost impossible to recover by conventional optimization approaches. Our framework can also be extended for different reference images. We performed extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons to show that our approach produces excellent results where color artifacts and geometric distortions are significantly reduced compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, and is robust across various inputs, including images without radiometric calibration.
Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) via rank minimization is a powerful tool for recovering underlying low-rank structure of clean data corrupted with sparse noise/outliers. In many low-level vision problems, not only it is known that the underlying structure of clean data is low-rank, but the exact rank of clean data is also known. Yet, when applying conventional rank minimization for those problems, the objective function is formulated in a way that does not fully utilize a priori target rank information about the problems. This observation motivates us to investigate whether there is a better alternative solution when using rank minimization. In this paper, instead of minimizing the nuclear norm, we propose to minimize the partial sum of singular values, which implicitly encourages the target rank constraint. Our experimental analyses show that, when the number of samples is deficient, our approach leads to a higher success rate than conventional rank minimization, while the solutions obtained by the two approaches are almost identical when the number of samples is more than sufficient. We apply our approach to various low-level vision problems, e.g., high dynamic range imaging, motion edge detection, photometric stereo, image alignment and recovery, and show that our results outperform those obtained by the conventional nuclear norm rank minimization method.
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