Abstract. High dynamic range images contain luminance information
of the physical world and provide more realistic experience than conventional low dynamic range images. Because most images have a low
dynamic range, recovering the lost dynamic range from a single low dynamic range image is still prevalent. We propose a novel method for
restoring the lost dynamic range from a single low dynamic range image through a deep neural network. The proposed method is the first
framework to create high dynamic range images based on the estimated
multi-exposure stack using the conditional generative adversarial network structure. In this architecture, we train the network by setting
an objective function that is a combination of L1 loss and generative
adversarial network loss. In addition, this architecture has a simplified
structure than the existing networks. In the experimental results, the
proposed network generated a multi-exposure stack consisting of realistic images with varying exposure values while avoiding artifacts on public
benchmarks, compared with the existing methods. In addition, both the
multi-exposure stacks and high dynamic range images estimated by the
proposed method are significantly similar to the ground truth than other
state-of-the-art algorithms.