A novel approach for detail-enhanced exposure fusion using guided filter

In this paper we propose a novel detail-enhancing exposure fusion approach using nonlinear translation-variant filter (NTF). With the captured Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) images under different exposure settings, first the fine details are extracted based on guided filter. Next, the base layers (i.e., images obtained from NTF) across all input images are fused using multiresolution pyramid. Exposure, contrast, and saturation measures are considered to generate a mask that guides the fusion process of the base layers. Finally, the fused base layer is combined with the extracted fine details to obtain detail-enhanced fused image. The goal is to preserve details in both very dark and extremely bright regions without High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) representation and tone mapping step. Moreover, we have demonstrated that the proposed method is also suitable for the multifocus image fusion without introducing artifacts.