Metering for Exposure Stacks

Abstract When creating a High‐Dynamic‐Range (HDR) image from a sequence of differently exposed Low‐Dynamic‐Range (LDR) images, the set of LDR images is usually generated by sampling the space of exposure times with a geometric progression and without explicitly accounting for the distribution of irradiance values of the scene. We argue that this choice can produce sub‐optimal results both in terms of the number of acquired pictures and the quality of the resulting HDR image. This paper presents a method to estimate the full irradiance histogram of a scene, and a strategy to select the set of exposures that need to be acquired. Our selection usually requires a smaller or equal set of LDRs, yet produces higher quality HDR images.