Abstract:
Techniques to capture and fuse short- and long-exposure images of a scene from a stabilized image capture device are disclosed. More particularly, the disclosed techniques use not only individual pixel differences between co-captured short- and long-exposure images, but also the spatial structure of occluded regions in the long-exposure images [e.g., areas of the long-exposure image(s) exhibiting blur due to scene object motion). A novel device used to represent this feature of the long-exposure image is a "spatial difference map." Spatial difference maps may be used to identify pixels in the short-and long-exposure images for fusion and, in one embodiment, may be used to identify pixels from the short-exposure image(s) to filter post-fusion so as to reduce visual discontinuities in the output image.
Abstract:
Techniques are disclosed for managing image capture and processing in a multi-camera imaging system. In such a system, a pair of cameras each may output a sequence of frames representing captured image data. The cameras output may be synchronized to each other to cause synchronism in the image capture operations of the cameras. The system may assess image quality of frames output from the cameras and, based on the image quality, designate a pair of the frames to serve as a reference frame pair. Thus, one frame from the first camera and a paired frame from the second camera will be designated as the reference frame pair. The system may adjust each reference frame in the pair using other frames from their respective cameras. The reference frames also may be processed by other operations within the system, such as image fusion.
Abstract:
Systems, methods, and computer readable media to capture and process high dynamic range (HDR) images when appropriate for a scene are disclosed. When appropriate, multiple images at a single - slightly underexposed - exposure value are captured (making a constant bracket HDR capture sequence) and local tone mapping (LTM) applied to each image. Local tone map and histogram information can be used to generate a noise-amplification mask which can be used during fusion operations. Images obtained and fused in the disclosed manner provide high dynamic range with improved noise and de- ghosting characteristics.
Abstract:
Foreign lighting effects, such as lens flare, are very common in natural images. In a two-camera-system, the two images may be fused together to generate one image of a better quality. However, there are frequently different foreign light patterns in the two images that form the image pair, e.g., due to the difference in lens design, sensor and position, etc. Directly fusing such pairs of images will result in non-photorealistic images, with composed foreign light patterns from both images from the image pair. This disclosure describes a general foreign light mitigation scheme to detect all kinds of foreign light region mismatches. The detected foreign light mismatch regions may be deemphasized or excluded in the fusion step, in order to create a fused image that keeps a natural-looking foreign light pattern that is close to what was seen by the user of an image capture device during an image capture preview mode.
Abstract:
Systems, methods, and computer readable media to improve image stabilization operations are described. Novel approaches for fusing non- reference images with a pre-selected reference frame in a set of commonly captured images are disclosed. The fusing approach may use a soft transition by using a weighted average for ghost/non-ghost pixels to avoid sudden transition between neighborhood and almost similar pixels. Additionally, the ghost/non-ghost decision can be made based on a set of neighboring pixels rather than independently for each pixel. An alternative approach may involve performing a multi-resolution decomposition of all the captured images, using temporal fusion, spatio-temporal fusion, or combinations thereof, at each level and combining the different levels to generate an output image.