# CEN-HDR: Computationally Efficient neural Network for real-time High Dynamic Range imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05213 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05213/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [BAM: Bottleneck Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06514/) (2018)
- [Learning Image-adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for High Performance Photo Enhancement in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14468/) (2020)
- [A2-Nets: Double Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11579/) (2018)
- [Single-Image HDR Reconstruction by Learning to Reverse the Camera Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01179/) (2020)
- [Attention-guided Network for Ghost-free High Dynamic Range Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10293/) (2019)
- [Deep High Dynamic Range Imaging with Large Foreground Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08937/) (2017)
- [HDR-GAN: HDR Image Reconstruction from Multi-Exposed LDR Images with Large Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01628/) (2020)
- [ADNet: Attention-guided Deformable Convolutional Network for High Dynamic Range Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10697/) (2021)
- [FHDR: HDR Image Reconstruction from a Single LDR Image using Feedback Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11463/) (2019)
- [EPSANet: An Efficient Pyramid Squeeze Attention Block on Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14447/) (2021)
- [Progressive and Selective Fusion Network for High Dynamic Range Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08585/) (2021)
- [NTIRE 2022 Challenge on High Dynamic Range Imaging: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12633/) (2022)
- [Self-Gated Memory Recurrent Network for Efficient Scalable HDR Deghosting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13050/) (2021)
- [Efficient Progressive High Dynamic Range Image Restoration via Attention and Alignment Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09213/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Alignment-free HDR Deghosting with Semantics Consistent Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18135/) (2023)
- [Efficient HDR Reconstruction from Real-World Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10311/) (2023)
- [PASTA: Towards Flexible and Efficient HDR Imaging Via Progressively Aggregated Spatio-Temporal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10376/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is still a challenging task in modern digital photography. Recent research proposes solutions that provide high-quality acquisition but at the cost of a very large number of operations and a slow inference time that prevent the implementation of these solutions on lightweight real-time systems. In this paper, we propose CEN-HDR, a new computationally efficient neural network by providing a novel architecture based on a light attention mechanism and sub-pixel convolution operations for real-time HDR imaging. We also provide an efficient training scheme by applying network compression using knowledge distillation. We performed extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons to show that our approach produces competitive results in image quality while being faster than state-of-the-art solutions, allowing it to be practically deployed under real-time constraints. Experimental results show our method obtains a score of 43.04 mu-PSNR on the Kalantari2017 dataset with a framerate of 33 FPS using a Macbook M1 NPU.