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HDR Exposure Synthesis

U-Net that predicts -2.7 EV and +2.7 EV exposures from a single photo, followed by a Debevec HDR merge in OpenCV. EXIF-driven triplet selection and tiled inference; the prototype works end to end but recovers only about 4 EV of dynamic range.

PythonPyTorchOpenCVPillow (EXIF)LPIPSHDR-Eye

Overview

A pipeline that tries to reconstruct HDR from one LDR image by synthesising two extra exposures. The dataset loader reads exposure times from EXIF, sorts the bracketed frames and picks the ones closest to +-2.7 EV relative to the middle frame. A U-Net with a six-channel output predicts both exposures at once, evaluation runs tiled full-resolution inference, merges the three images with the Debevec algorithm and compares the dynamic range with the reference HDR. Only 16 scenes had usable EXIF for training and 3 for testing, the model overfitted, PSNR of the generated exposures was 15.8 dB (under) and 18.6 dB (over), and the merged HDR covered about 4 EV against 19-25 EV for the references. The repository documents these limitations and the next step (a smaller model with dropout).

Key Highlights

  • ✓EXIF-based bracket triplet selection independent of file names
  • ✓Six-channel U-Net predicting under- and overexposed images together
  • ✓Tiled full-resolution inference, Debevec merge, Reinhard tone mapping
  • ✓Dynamic-range comparison against reference HDR images
  • ✓Limitations and results documented, not hidden

Technical Deep Dive

Problem & Goal

Recover missing shadow and highlight detail of a single photo by generating virtual exposures and merging them into an HDR image.

Results & Limitations

Test scenes C40, C41, C43: generated exposures reached 15.78 dB PSNR (-2.7 EV) and 18.60 dB (+2.7 EV); reconstructed dynamic range was 3.9-4.3 EV versus 18.7-24.9 EV for the reference HDR. The small dataset and colour casts in the predictions limit the result, so this is a working prototype rather than a competitive method.

My Role & Scope

Team project. The repository was published from a single commit, so individual contributions are not recorded and none is claimed here.

Screenshots & Images

HDR Exposure Synthesis - Image 1
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HDR Exposure Synthesis - Image 2
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HDR Exposure Synthesis - Image 3
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