Enhanced local tone mapping for detail preserving reproduction of high dynamic range images

Enhanced Local Tone Mapping (ELTM) is a flexible tone mapping operator designed to provide a good global and local contrast simultaneously over various test scenes. Also, it has intuitive and decoupled tuning interface, providing the user with full control over final image appearance. ELTM is based on detail/base layer decomposition compressing the base plane in both linear and logarithmic domain. This provides robustness to ELTM, while modified tone compression function provides good local contrast. Results were validated using set of images with various content, brightness and resolution. In this testing ELTM performed as the best tone mapping operator, among 7 state-of-the-art global and local tone mapping operators. Even better overall results are achieved by using proposed brightness control, to handle extreme scenes. Robustness and flexibility to achieve desired appearance makes ELTM suitable for applications where user experience is the primary concern as is the case with consumer electronics products.