Open Source HDR library recommendations

Question

Hi All,

So I'm doing some research related to High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI). I've already done some work in OpenCV related to aligning and ghost removal (no actual HDR manipulation or creation yet), and now I would like to be able to start working with HDR images.

Can anyone recommend a good open source HDR library that would ideally allow me to do the following:

• Read/ Write an HDR format (I'm not commited to a particular format yet, so I'm open to suggestions here)

• Combine exposure-bracketed images to get HDR images, but in a way that allows me to access the camera function that gets created so that I can later use this to do things like using different numbers of EB images to contribute to different parts of the HDR image.

• Interface relatively easily with OpenCV (see below for details).

If it's a library that allows easy interfacing with OpenCV, that would be ideal. I don't think there is currently any HDR functionality in OpenCV, but can anyone tell me if there's a way to convert an HDR image into a format that OpenCV algorithns such as inpainting will work with? For example, I know OpenCV can work with 64-bit floating point images; can I just convert an HDR image into one of these formats and run with it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would say converting would probably just be easiest. I would look at the imagemagick (http://www.imagemagick.org) libraries for conversion.

Answer 2

I am using FreeImage library to load HDR images (this library supports most raw camera formats, floating-point image types, and 48bpp, 64bpp images).

Then I did a converter class in C++ that is able to convert from FreeImage-type images to OpenCV and vice-versa. FreeImage also has tone-mapping conversions to change HDR images to 32bpp images.