On July, 4, Chao Wang successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Deep High Dynamic Range Imaging: Reconstruction, Generation and Display”. Chao Wang joined Saarland University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in September 2020 as a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Professor Karol Myszkowski. He was a member of both the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science and the International Max Planck Research School. His doctoral degree was awarded by Saarland University.
The abstract of his Thesis:
High Dynamic Range (HDR) images offer clear advantages over Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images, such as greater bit depth, a wider color gamut, and improved dynamic range, enhancing both visual quality and post-production flexibility. However, challenges remain in HDR content acquisition and display. This thesis investigates deep learning methods informed by physical priors to address these challenges. It explores HDR reconstruction from sparse, defocused LDR inputs using implicit neural representations, and extends to HDR all-in-focus field reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Splatting from multi-view inputs. It further explores HDR generation from in-the-wild LDR images or limited HDR images, leveraging the learned HDR prior for LDR-to-HDR restoration. Lastly, it proposes a self-supervised tone mapping framework based on feature contrast masking loss to enable perceptually faithful HDR display on LDR devices.