Freehand HDR photography with motion compensation

In theory HDR photography generated from exposure sequences is limited to pictures of still scenes preferably taken with the camera mounted on a tripod. Current state-of-the-art HDR imaging software relaxes this limitation by aligning the pictures with affine transformations. However, two pictures cannot be aligned with a single affine transformation if objects in the scene move or the position of the camera changes which causes parallax effects in the image. In this paper, a method for the non-linear alignment of a picture sequence for HDR imaging is presented. By using techniques for motion detection and compensation, the approach is not only capable to correctly align pictures containing parallax effects, but also able to compensate for the movement of objects in the scene. This way, taking freehand HDR pictures from non-static scenes becomes possible with off-the-shelf digital cameras.