Dense SIFT for ghost-free multi-exposure fusion

•Two dense SIFT based quality measures for multi-exposure fusion are presented.•A new ghost-free multi-exposure fusion method based on dense SIFT is proposed.•Two weight distribution strategies for local contrast extraction are studied.

Due to the limited capture range of common imaging sensors, a scene with high dynamic range usually cannot be well described by a single still image because some regions in it may be under-exposed or over-exposed. In this paper, a new multi-exposure fusion method based on dense scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) is presented. In our algorithm, the dense SIFT descriptor is first employed as the activity level measurement to extract local details from source images, and then adopted to remove ghosting artifacts when the captured scene is dynamic with moving objects. Furthermore, two popular weight distribution strategies for local contrast extraction, namely, “weighted-average” and “winner-take-all” are studied in this paper. The effects of these two strategies on the fusion results are compared and discussed. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of both visual quality and objective evaluation.