SIGGRAPH: HDRchitecture Real-Time Stereoscopic HDR Imaging System

By Dennis Kuba
August 14, 2012

Current digital cameras have limited dynamic ranges. Users typically expose for the highlights or the shadows or a compromise between them, and rarely get everything exposed properly.
To address this, University of Toronto researchers showed their HDRchitecture in the Emerging Technology section of SIGGRAPH last week. HDRchitecture is a real-time visualization system that can handle scenes with dynamic ranges in excess of a million to one.
The demonstration featured a welding scene in which attendees were able to clearly see the object being welded as well as nearby objects without the usual visual distortion. (Take a look at the video demo.)
The real-time HDRchitecture video system processes up to 120 frames per second in groups of three or four frames. Each frame has a different exposure setting. And together in a group, it captures both the highlights and shadows.
The system them composites the images together for viewing at 30fps on a lower dynamic range display. The system can render images at a high image quality up to 1920×1080 resolution and can accommodate stereoscopic vision.
HDRchitecture uses GPUs and multicore CPUs for real-time HDR processing. The system is compact enough that it might eventually be incorporated into eyeglasses.
Finally, the HDRchitecture system may be adapted to current digital cameras. One of the rigs shown consisted of a Canon DSLR with customized firmware. One limitation of that system, however, was a reduced frame rate of only 20fps.

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