Hardware-based smart camera for recovering high dynamic range video from multiple exposures

Abstract

In many applications such as video surveillance or defect detection, the perception of information related to a scene is limited in areas with strong contrasts. The high dynamic range (HDR) capture technique can deal with these limitations. The proposed method has the advantage of automatically selecting multiple exposure times to make outputs more visible than fixed exposure ones. A real-time hardware implementation of the HDR technique that shows more details both in dark and bright areas of a scene is an important line of research. For this purpose, we built a dedicated smart camera that performs both capturing and HDR video processing from three exposures. What is new in our work is shown through the following points: HDR video capture through multiple exposure control, HDR memory management, HDR frame generation, and representation under a hardware context. Our camera achieves a real-time HDR video output at 60 fps at 1.3 mega-pixels and demonstrates the efficiency of our technique through an experimental result. Applications of this HDR smart camera include the movie industry, the mass-consumer market, military, automotive industry, and surveillance. (C) 2014 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE