Patent ID: 7142723

Claim:
A system for generating a high dynamic range (HDR) image from an image sequence of a scene captured while varying the exposure of each image, comprising: a general purpose computing device; a computer program comprising program modules executable by the computing device, wherein the computing device is directed by the program modules of the computer program to, designate the image having the greatest number of valid pixels as a reference image, wherein a pixel is valid if it is not saturated and it exhibits an acceptable degree of contrast, for each image except the reference image, register the image under consideration with the image, including the reference image, which exhibits an exposure that is both closer to that of the reference image than the image under consideration and closest among the images to the exposure of the image under consideration, to generate a flow field, concatenate the flow fields generated for the non-reference images not already registered with the reference image, to register each of them with the reference image, warp each non-reference image using the flow field associated therewith, and combine the reference image and the warped images to create a radiance map representing the HDR image.