Detail Enhancement for High Dynamic Range Images Rendering Based on Multi-Level Decomposition

Various tone reproduction operators have been proposed to display high dynamic range images on low dynamic range (LDR) devices. Many recent computational photography techniques decompose an image into a piecewise smooth base layer, containing large scale variations in intensity, and a residual detail layer capturing the smaller scale details in the image. In these techniques, its important to control the scale of the extracted details and it is often needed to manipulate details in order to avoid the appearance of visual artifacts. In this paper, a new method is proposed to preserve details for high dynamic range images tone reproduction using multi-level image decomposition. We show that current base-detail decomposition techniques, based on the bilateral filter, are limited in their ability to extract detail at arbitrary scales. Thus, we achieve detail enhancement by applying the bilateral filter iteratively, and this process is called multi-level decomposition. By minimizing the proposed energy function, we can choose the proper decomposition level. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can acquire better visual quality in detail enhancement while make the base smoothness.