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It is challenging to align multi-exposed images due to large illumination variations, especially in presence of saturated regions. In this paper, a novel image alignment algorithm is proposed to cope with the multi-exposed images with saturated regions. Specifically, the multi-exposed images are first normalized by using intensity mapping functions (IMFs) in consideration of saturated pixels. Then, the normalized images are coded by using the local binary pattern (LBP). Finally, the coded images are aligned by formulating an optimization problem by using a differentiable Hamming distance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art alignment methods for multi-exposed images in terms of alignment accuracy and robustness to exposure values.

Saturation and large intensity variations occurred in multi-exposed images offer great challenges to align these images. In this paper, a mutual local-ternary-pattern (MLTP) is proposed to represent differently exposed images for image registration. Different from the classical local ternary pattern (LTP) and its variants, the proposed MLTP has two salient properties: (1) The ternary pattern of one image is not only determined by itself, but also relied on its counterpart; (2) The MLTP is grayscale-adaptive. It is analyzed that the proposed MLTP is a good representation to preserve consistency of differently exposed images. Based on the MLTP-coded images, an efficient linear model derived from Taylor expansion is presented to estimate motion parameters. To improve accuracy and efficiency, image rotation is initially detected by the histogram-based matching, and coarse-to-fine technique is implemented to cope with possibly large movement. Extensive experiments carried out on a variety of synthesized and real multi-exposed images demonstrate that the proposed method is robust to 10 exposure values (EV), which is superior to other methods and current commercial HDR tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]