Multi-exposure image fusion via deep perceptual enhancement

Due to the huge gap between the high dynamic range of natural scenes and the limited (low) range of consumer-grade cameras, a single-shot image can hardly record all the information of a scene. Multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) has been an effective way to solve this problem by integrating multiple shots with different exposures, which is in nature an enhancement problem. During fusion, two perceptual factors including the informativeness and the visual realism should be concerned simultaneously. To achieve the goal, this paper presents a deep perceptual enhancement network for MEF, termed as DPE-MEF. Specifically, the proposed DPE-MEF contains two modules, one of which responds to gather content details from inputs while the other takes care of color mapping/correction for final results. Both extensive experimental results and ablation studies are conducted to show the efficacy of our design, and demonstrate its superiority over other state-of-the-art alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively. We also verify the flexibility of the proposed strategy on improving the exposure quality of single images. Moreover, our DPE-MEF can fuse 720p images in more than 60 pairs per second on an Nvidia 2080Ti GPU, making it attractive for practical use. Our code is available at https://github.com/dongdong4fei/DPE-MEF.