Event-based asynchronous HDR imaging by temporal incident light modulation

Abstract

Dynamic range (DR) is a pivotal characteristic of imaging systems. Current frame-based cameras struggle to achieve high dynamic range imaging due to the conflict between globally uniform exposure and spatially variant scene illumination. In this paper, we propose AsynHDR, a pixel-asynchronous HDR imaging system, based on key insights into the challenges in HDR imaging and the unique event-generating mechanism of dynamic vision sensors (DVS). Our proposed AsynHDR system integrates the DVS with a set of LCD panels. The LCD panels modulate the irradiance incident upon the DVS by altering their transparency, thereby triggering the pixel-independent event streams. The HDR image is subsequently decoded from the event streams through our temporal-weighted algorithm. Experiments under the standard test platform and several challenging scenes have verified the feasibility of the system in HDR imaging tasks.