Organizations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Abstract
Single-image HDR reconstruction aims to recover high dynamic range radiance from a single low dynamic range (LDR) input, but remains highly ill-posed due to detail saturation in over-exposed regions and noise amplification in under-exposed areas. While recent diffusion-based approaches offer powerful generative priors, they often overlook the exposure-dependent nature of the degradation and incur substantial computational costs from iterative sampling. To address these challenges, we propose ExpoCM, a novel one-step generative HDR reconstruction framework that reformulates HDR reconstruction as a Probability Flow ODE (PF-ODE) and constructs exposure-aware consistency trajectories via exposure-dependent perturbations. Specifically, a soft exposure mask is first constructed to separate the LDR image into over-, under-, and well-exposed regions. Based on this partition, region-conditioned consistency trajectories are designed to hallucinate saturated details, suppress noise in dark regions, and preserve reliable structures within a single, distillation-free inference step. To further enhance perceptual quality, we introduce an Exposure-guided Luminance-Chromaticity Loss in the CIE~L∗a∗b∗ space, which assigns exposure-aware weights to luminance and chromaticity components, effectively mitigating brightness bias and color drift. Extensive experiments on the HDR-REAL, HDR-EYE, and AIM2025 benchmarks demonstrate that ExpoCM achieves state-of-the-art fidelity and perceptual accuracy, while enabling over 400× and 20× faster inference compared to DDPM (1000 steps) and DDIM (50 steps), respectively.
Pre-trained Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have recently shown strong perceptual priors for low-level vision tasks, making them a promising direction for multi-exposure High Dynamic Range (HDR) reconstruction. However, directly applying LDMs to HDR remains challenging due to: (1) limited dynamic-range representation caused by 8-bit latent compression, (2) high inference cost from multi-step denoising, and (3) content hallucination inherent to their generative nature. To address these challenges, we introduce GMODiff, a gain map-driven one-step diffusion framework for multi-exposure HDR reconstruction. Instead of reconstructing full HDR content, we reformulate HDR reconstruction as a degradation-aware Gain Map (GM) refinement problem, where the GM encodes the extended dynamic range while retaining the same bit depth as LDR images. We initialize the denoising process from an informative regression-based estimate rather than pure noise, allowing the model to generate high-quality GMs in a single denoising step. Furthermore, recognizing that regression-based models excel in content fidelity while LDMs favor perceptual quality, we leverage regression priors to guide both the denoising process and latent decoding of the LDM, suppressing hallucinations while preserving structural accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GMODiff performs favorably against several state-of-the-art methods and is 100x faster than previous LDM-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/gbymat/GMODiff.
Recent generative methods for single-shot high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction show promising results, but often struggle with preserving fidelity to the input image. They require separate models to handle highlights and shadows, or sacrifice interpretability by directly predicting the final HDR image. We address these limitations by re-casting single-shot HDR reconstruction as conditional video generation and fusing the generated frames into an HDR image. We finetune a video diffusion model to generate an exposure bracket, conditioned on a low dynamic range (LDR) input. We fuse this image bracket using per-pixel weights predicted by a light-weight UNet. This formulation is simple, interpretable, and effective. Rather than directly hallucinating an HDR image, it explicitly reconstructs the intermediate exposure stack and fuses it into the final output. Our method eliminates the need for separate models across exposure regimes and produces HDR reconstructions with high input fidelity. On quantitative benchmarks, we outperform state-of-the-art generative baselines with comparable model capacity on several reconstruction metrics. Human evaluators further prefer our results in 72% of pairwise comparisons against existing methods. Finally, we show that this input-conditioned sequence generation and fusion framework extends beyond HDR to other image reconstruction tasks, such as all-in-focus image recovery from a single defocus-blurred input.
Chinmay Talegaonkar, Jinshi He, Christopher McKenna +1
We propose DOME-HDR, a dual-output multi-exposure HDR reconstruction framework that jointly produces a perceptually balanced SDR image and a consistent HDR image via gain map inverse tone mapping. Given three bracketed LDR inputs, DOME-HDR first synthesizes a base SDR using a LoRA-adapted latent diffusion model. A dual cross-attention fusion module injects complementary structural and color cues from the under- and over-exposed images while anchoring on the mid exposure for stability. The synthesized SDR then guides HPGM, our HDR Prior-guided Gain Map network, to predict a spatially varying gain map for reliable dynamic-range expansion. We evaluate on Kalantari, Tel, and Challenge123 using both full-reference and no-reference metrics, where DOME-HDR achieves state-of-the-art HDR reconstruction quality; ablations further confirm the effectiveness of dual cross-attention and SDR-guided gain map estimation.