  With the increasing popularity and accessibility of high dynamic range (HDR)
photography, tone mapping operators (TMOs) for dynamic range compression are
practically demanding. In this paper, we develop a two-stage neural
network-based TMO that is self-calibrated and perceptually optimized. In Stage
one, motivated by the physiology of the early stages of the human visual
system, we first decompose an HDR image into a normalized Laplacian pyramid. We
then use two lightweight deep neural networks (DNNs), taking the normalized
representation as input and estimating the Laplacian pyramid of the
corresponding LDR image. We optimize the tone mapping network by minimizing the
normalized Laplacian pyramid distance (NLPD), a perceptual metric aligning with
human judgments of tone-mapped image quality. In Stage two, the input HDR image
is self-calibrated to compute the final LDR image. We feed the same HDR image
but rescaled with different maximum luminances to the learned tone mapping
network, and generate a pseudo-multi-exposure image stack with different detail
visibility and color saturation. We then train another lightweight DNN to fuse
the LDR image stack into a desired LDR image by maximizing a variant of the
structural similarity index for multi-exposure image fusion (MEF-SSIM), which
has been proven perceptually relevant to fused image quality. The proposed
self-calibration mechanism through MEF enables our TMO to accept uncalibrated
HDR images, while being physiology-driven. Extensive experiments show that our
method produces images with consistently better visual quality. Additionally,
since our method builds upon three lightweight DNNs, it is among the fastest
local TMOs.
