Burst photography for high dynamic range and low-light imaging on mobile cameras

Samuel W. Hasinoff, Dillon Sharlet, Ryan Geiss, Andrew Adams, Jonathan T. Barron, Florian Kainz, Jiawen Chen, Marc Levoy
2016 ACM Transactions on Graphics  
A comparison of a conventional camera pipeline (left, middle) and our burst photography pipeline (right) running on the same cell-phone camera. In this low-light setting (about 0.7 lux), the conventional camera pipeline under-exposes (left). Brightening the image (middle) reveals heavy spatial denoising, which results in loss of detail and an unpleasantly blotchy appearance. Fusing a burst of images increases the signal-to-noise ratio, making aggressive spatial denoising unnecessary. We
more » ... e the reader to zoom in. While our pipeline excels in low-light and high-dynamic-range scenes (for an example of the latter see figure 10 ), it is computationally efficient and reliably artifact-free, so it can be deployed on a mobile camera and used as a substitute for the conventional pipeline in almost all circumstances. For readability the figure has been made uniformly brighter than the original photographs.
doi:10.1145/2980179.2980254 fatcat:osxcads45vdvniilgub7fkr6pq