Perceptual Comparison of Multi-exposure High Dynamic Range and Single-Shot Camera RAW Photographs

Abstract

In this paper we evaluate the perceptual fidelity of single-shot low dynamic range photographs of high dynamic range scenes. We argue that contemporary DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) cameras equipped with the high-end sensors are enough to capture full luminance range of the majority of typical scenes. The RGB images computed directly from the camera sensor data, called RAW images, retain the entire dynamic range of the sensor, however, they suffer from visible noise in dark regions. In this work we evaluate visibility of this noise in a perceptual experiment, in which people manually mark differences between a single-shot camera RAW image and a corresponding high quality image - the high dynamic range photograph created using the multi-exposure technique. We also show that the HDR-VDP-2 image quality metric can be efficiently applied to automatically detect noisy regions without the need for time-consuming experiments.