Revisiting the Stack-Based Inverse Tone Mapping

Ning Zhang, Yuyao Ye, Yang Zhao, Ronggang Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 9162-9171

Current stack-based inverse tone mapping (ITM) methods can recover high dynamic range (HDR) radiance by predicting a set of multi-exposure images from a single low dynamic range image. However, there are still some limitations. On the one hand, these methods estimate a fixed number of images (e.g., three exposure-up and three exposure-down), which may introduce unnecessary computational cost or reconstruct incorrect results. On the other hand, they neglect the connections between the up-exposure and down-exposure models and thus fail to fully excavate effective features. In this paper, we revisit the stack-based ITM approaches and propose a novel method to reconstruct HDR radiance from a single image, which only needs to estimate two exposure images. At first, we design the exposure adaptive block that can adaptively adjust the exposure based on the luminance distribution of the input image. Secondly, we devise the cross-model attention block to connect the exposure adjustment models. Thirdly, we propose an end-to-end ITM pipeline by incorporating the multi-exposure fusion model. Furthermore, we propose and open a multi-exposure dataset that indicates the optimal exposure-up/down levels. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.