Joint Demosaicing and Deghosting of Time-Varying Exposures for Single-Shot HDR Imaging

The quad-Bayer patterned image sensor has made significant improvements in spatial resolution over recent years due to advancements in image sensor technology. This has enabled single-shot high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging using spatially varying multiple exposures. Popular methods for multi-exposure array sensors involve varying the gain of each exposure, but this does not effectively change the photoelectronic energy in each exposure. Consequently, HDR images produced using gain-based exposure variation may suffer from noise and details being saturated. To address this problem, we intend to use time-varying exposures in quad-Bayer patterned sensors. This approach allows long-exposure pixels to receive more photon energy than short- or middle-exposure pixels, resulting in higher-quality HDR images. However, time-varying exposures are not ideal for dynamic scenes and require an additional deghosting method. To tackle this issue, we propose a single-shot HDR demosaicing method that takes time-varying multiple exposures as input and jointly solves both the demosaicing and deghosting problems. Our method uses a feature-extraction module to handle mosaiced multiple exposures and a multiscale transformer module to register spatial displacements of multiple exposures and colors. We also created a dataset of quad-Bayer sensor input with time-varying exposures and trained our network using this dataset. Results demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline HDR reconstruction methods with both synthetic and real datasets. With our method, we can achieve high-quality HDR images in challenging lighting conditions.