Zero-Shot Structure-Preserving Diffusion Model for High Dynamic Range Tone Mapping

Ruoxi Zhu, Shusong Xu, Peiye Liu, Sicheng Li, Yanheng Lu, Dimin Niu, Zihao Liu, Zihao Meng, Zhiyong Li, Xinhua Chen, Yibo Fan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 26130-26139

Tone mapping techniques aiming to convert high dynamic range (HDR) images to high-quality low dynamic range (LDR) images for display play a more crucial role in real-world vision systems with the increasing application of HDR images. However obtaining paired HDR and high-quality LDR images is difficult posing a challenge to deep learning based tone mapping methods. To overcome this challenge we propose a novel zero-shot tone mapping framework that utilizes shared structure knowledge allowing us to transfer a pre-trained mapping model from the LDR domain to HDR fields without paired training data. Our approach involves decomposing both the LDR and HDR images into two components: structural information and tonal information. To preserve the original image's structure we modify the reverse sampling process of a diffusion model and explicitly incorporate the structure information into the intermediate results. Additionally for improved image details we introduce a dual-control network architecture that enables different types of conditional inputs to control different scales of the output. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover our model exhibits versatility and can be applied to other low-level vision tasks without retraining. The code is available at https://github.com/ZSDM-HDR/Zero-Shot-Diffusion-HDR.