Learning an Inverse Tone Mapping Network with a Generative Adversarial Regularizer

Abstract

Transferring a low-dynamic-range (LDR) image to a highdynamic-range (HDR) image, which is the so-called inverse tone mapping (iTM), is an important imaging technique to improve visual effects of imaging devices. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based iTM method, which learns an inverse tone mapping network with a generative adversarial regularizer. In the framework of alternating optimization, we learn a U-Net-based HDR image generator to transfer input LDR images to HDR ones, and a simple CNN-based discriminator to classify the real HDR images and the generated ones. Specifically, when learning the generator we consider the content-related loss and the generative adversarial regularizer jointly to improve the stability and the robustness of the generated HDR images. Using the learned generator as the proposed inverse tone mapping network, we achieve superior iTM results to the state-of-the-art methods consistently.

Publication
2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Li Song
Li Song
Professor, IEEE Senior Member

Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, the Deputy Director of the Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Double-Appointed Professor of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and the Collaborative Innovation Center of Future Media Network, the Deputy Secretary-General of the China Video User Experience Alliance and head of the standards group.