Patent ID: 8310562
Filing Date: 2012-11-13
Classification: H04N

Abstract:
1. An imaging control apparatus comprising: an image data obtaining unit for obtaining at least one version of image data of a plurality of versions of image data obtained by imaging an object using an imaging device with different lengths of exposure time; a combined image data obtaining unit for obtaining a first combined image data obtained by combining at least two or more versions of image data of the plurality of versions of image data; a gain distribution generation unit for generating a gain distribution that is a distribution of gain factors to be used for compressing the tonal range of luminance of the first combined image data based on the image data obtained by the image data obtaining unit; and a tonal conversion unit for converting the tonal range of luminance of the first combined image data obtained by the combined image data obtaining unit to a tonal range narrower than the original tonal range based on a gain distribution generated by the gain distribution generation unit wherein, the gain distribution generation unit venerates luminance image data by performing filtering on the image data obtained by the image data obtaining unit to extract illumination light component from the image data, and generates the gain distribution based on the generated luminance image data, a value Y′ of the pixel data tonal-converted by the tonal conversion unit is calculated according to the following formula (1): where Y is the value of each pixel data of the first combined image data, P is the value of each pixel data of the luminance image data, and the K(P) is a gain corresponding to the Y, and the gain distribution generation unit, having a lookup table storing data of the gain K(P) for a predetermined luminance value, generates the gain distribution by retrieving a gain K from the lookup table for each of a plurality of pixel data of the luminance image data.