Patent ID: 8300931

Claim:
A non-linear tone mapping apparatus, comprising: a normalization unit configured to normalize an image information of each pixel of an object image; a luminance value computing unit configured to compute a luminance value of each pixel of the object image using the normalized image information of each pixel inputted from the normalization unit, wherein the operation of the luminance value computing unit follows the operation of the normalization unit; a computing unit configured to compute a light adaptive value of each pixel using the image information and the computed luminance value of each pixel, where the light adaptive value represents each pixel's degree of response to brightness of the image, wherein the computing unit comprises a luminance adaptive value computing unit for computing a luminance adaptive value of each pixel using the image information of each pixel and the luminance value of each pixel; a converting unit configured to convert the image information of each pixel using the image information of each pixel and the light adaptive value of each pixel; and a denormalization unit configured to denormalize the image information of each pixel converted by the converting unit, wherein the luminance value computing unit computes the luminance value using the image information of each pixel normalized by the normalization unit, wherein the luminance adaptive value computing unit computes the luminance adaptive value using a first value and a second value, wherein the first value is the product of applying a first weight to the normalized image information of each pixel, and the second value is the product of applying a second weight to the luminance value of each pixel, and wherein a sum of the first weight and the second weight is 1.