2023/08/16 by Mingyang Xie, Xie, Mingyang, Matthew Chan +3
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Optical Sensing Technologies #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image Enhancement Techniques #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Optical measurement and interference techniques #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2308.08094
openalex publication_date 2023/08/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
High dynamic range (HDR) images are important for a range of tasks, from navigation to consumer photography. Accordingly, a host of specialized HDR sensors have been developed, the most successful of which are based on capturing variable per-pixel exposures. In essence, these methods capture an entire exposure bracket sequence at once in a single shot. This paper presents a straightforward but highly effective approach for turning an off-the-shelf polarization camera into a high-performance HDR camera. By placing a linear polarizer in front of the polarization camera, we are able to simultaneously capture four images with varied exposures, which are determined by the orientation of the polarizer. We develop an outlier-robust and self-calibrating algorithm to reconstruct an HDR image (at a single polarity) from these measurements. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with extensive real-world experiments.