HDR Photography

Video
While custom high-dynamic-range digital video solutions had been developed for industrial manufacturing during the 1980s, it was not until the early 2000s that several scholarly research efforts used consumer-grade sensors and cameras. A few companies such as RED and Arri have been developing digital sensors capable of a higher dynamic range, but have yet to be released or made affordable. With the advent of low cost consumer digital cameras, many amateurs began posting tone-mapped HDR time-lapse videos on the Internet, essentially a sequence of still photographs in quick succession. In 2010 the independent studio Soviet Montage produced an example of HDR video from disparately exposed video streams using a beam splitter and consumer grade HD video cameras. Similar techniques have been described in the academic literature in 2001 and 2007 and 2011.
Modern movies have often been filmed with cameras featuring a higher dynamic range, and legacy movies can be upgraded even if manual intervention would be required for some frames (as this happened in the past with black&white films’ upgrade to color). Also, special effects, especially those in which real and synthetic footage are seamlessly mixed, require both HDR shooting and rendering. HDR video is also required in all applications in which capturing temporal aspects of changes in the scene is required with high accuracy. This is in particular important in monitoring of some industrial processes such as welding, predictive driver assistance systems in automotive industry, surveillance systems, to name just a few possible applications. HDR video can be also considered to speed up the image acquisition in all applications, in which a large number of static HDR images are required, as for example in image-based techniques in computer graphics. Finally, with the spread of TV sets featuring enhanced dynamic range, broadcasting HDR video will be important, but may take a long time to actually occur due to standardization issues. For this particular application, enhancing current LDR video signal to HDR by intelligent TV sets seems to be a more viable near-term solution.