Scene motion correction in fused image systems

摘要

Techniques to capture and fuse short- and long-exposure images of a scene from a stabilized image capture device are disclosed. More particularly, the disclosed techniques use not only individual pixel differences between co-captured short- and long-exposure images, but also the spatial structure of occluded regions in the long-exposure images (e.g., areas of the long-exposure image(s) exhibiting blur due to scene object motion). A novel device used to represent this feature of the long-exposure image is a “spatial difference map.” Spatial difference maps may be used to identify pixels in the short- and long-exposure images for fusion and, in one embodiment, may be used to identify pixels from the short-exposure image(s) to filter post-fusion so as to reduce visual discontinuities in the output image.

主权项

1. A method to fuse images based on scene motion, comprising:
obtaining a first short-exposure image of a scene followed immediately by a long-exposure image of the scene followed immediately by a second short-exposure image of the scene; determining a first spatial difference map based on the first and second short-exposure images; determining a motion value indicative of an amount of motion of an object in the scene based on the first spatial difference map; designating the long-exposure image as an output image when the motion value is less than a first threshold or greater than a second threshold; determining the output image in accordance with the following when the motion value is greater than or equal to the first threshold and less than or equal to the second threshold—
determining a reduced-noise short-exposure image based on the first and second short-exposure images and the first spatial difference map, anddetermining the output image based on a combination of the reduced-noise short-exposure image and the long-exposure image; and storing the output image in a memory.