Color high dynamic range imaging: The luminance-chrominance approach

This paper presents a novel and efficient approach to color in high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. In contrast to state-of-theart methods, we propose to move the complete HDR imaging process from RGB to a luminance-chrominance color space. Our aim is to get a computationally efficient technique and to avoid any possible color distortions originating from the three RGB color channels processed separately. To achieve this, we build a camera response function for the luminance channel only and weight and compose the HDR luminance accordingly, while for the chrominance channels we apply weighting in relation with the saturation level. We demonstrate that our technique yields natural and pleasant to perceive tone-mapped images and is also more robust to noise.