Single Image Brightening Via Exposure Fusion

It is very challenging to capture images via cell phone cameras in low-lighting conditions due to possible motion blur, especially for a high dynamic range (HDR) scene. In this paper, a new single image brightening algorithm is introduced to support capturing an image with a small exposure time and a small ISO value for a low-lighting scene. There are negligible motion blur and over-exposed pixels in the captured image while both details in the darkest regions and the brightness of the image are reduced. The proposed algorithm is applied to brighten the under-exposed regions and to enhance details of the under-exposed regions with negligible increment on the brightness of the brightest areas. The proposed algorithm can also be adopted to brighten an image captured for an HDR scene at day time but with dark objects.