Freehand HDR photography with motion compensation

Abstract

In theory HDR photography generated from expo-sure sequences is limited to pictures of still scenes preferably taken with the camera mounted on a tri-pod. Current state-of-the-art HDR imaging soft-ware relaxes this limitation by aligning the pictures with afne transformations. However, two pictures cannot be aligned with a single afne transforma-tion if objects in the scene move or the position of the camera changes which causes parallax effects in the image. In this paper, a method for the non-linear align-ment of a picture sequence for HDR imaging is pre-sented. By using techniques for motion detection and compensation, the approach is not only capa-ble to correctly align pictures containing parallax effects, but also able to compensate for the move-ment of objects in the scene. This way, taking free-hand HDR pictures from non-static scenes becomes possible with off-the-shelf digital cameras. 1