High Dynamic Range Imaging Using Deep Image Priors

Traditionally, dynamic range enhancement for images has involved a combination of contrast improvement (via gamma correction or histogram equalization) and a denoising operation to reduce the effects of photon noise. More recently, modulo-imaging methods have been introduced for high dynamic range photography to significantly expand dynamic range at the sensing stage itself. The transformation function for both of these problems is highly non-linear, and the image reconstruction procedure is typically non-convex and ill-posed. A popular recent approach is to regularize the above inverse problem via a neural network prior (such as a trained autoencoder), but this requires extensive training over a dataset with thousands of paired regular/HDR image data samples. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for HDR image reconstruction using neural priors that require no training data. Specifically, we employ deep image priors, which have been successfully used for inverse imaging problems. In this paper, we consider two different approaches to high dynamic range (HDR) imaging -- gamma encoding and modulo encoding -- and propose a combination of deep image prior and total variation (TV) regularization for reconstructing low-light images. We demonstrate the significant improvement achieved by both of these approaches as compared to traditional dynamic range enhancement techniques.