  This paper proposes a hybrid synthesis method for multi-exposure image fusion
taken by hand-held cameras. Motions either due to the shaky camera or caused by
dynamic scenes should be compensated before any content fusion. Any
misalignment can easily cause blurring/ghosting artifacts in the fused result.
Our hybrid method can deal with such motions and maintain the exposure
information of each input effectively. In particular, the proposed method first
applies optical flow for a coarse registration, which performs well with
complex non-rigid motion but produces deformations at regions with missing
correspondences. The absence of correspondences is due to the occlusions of
scene parallax or the moving contents. To correct such error registration, we
segment images into superpixels and identify problematic alignments based on
each superpixel, which is further aligned by PatchMatch. The method combines
the efficiency of optical flow and the accuracy of PatchMatch. After PatchMatch
correction, we obtain a fully aligned image stack that facilitates a
high-quality fusion that is free from blurring/ghosting artifacts. We compare
our method with existing fusion algorithms on various challenging examples,
including the static/dynamic, the indoor/outdoor and the daytime/nighttime
scenes. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our
method.
