High Dynamic Range Video Reconstruction from Single-Exposure Raw Sequences

Abstract

Due to the limited dynamic range of conventional image sensors, captured low dynamic range (LDR) video often suffers from highlight clipping and shadow detail loss, making high-quality high dynamic range (HDR) reconstruction from single-exposure sequences highly challenging without alternating exposures or extra hardware. Alternating-exposure HDR methods sacrifice frame rate and struggle with motion alignment, making them impractical for real-world capture. To address this, we propose RawHDRV, an end-to-end framework for single-exposure Raw video HDR reconstruction, that fundamentally exploits the linear response and channel-specific characteristics of Bayer data. Specifically, it features a channel-decomposition temporal alignment and fusion strategy that processes Bayer channels separately to exploit their distinct exposure characteristics, together with exposure-aware weighted fusion. It further incorporates an exposure complementarity mask-guided restoration module that leverages inter-frame exposure redundancy to adaptively fuse reliable information and suppress saturation artifacts, and introduces a mask-guided color loss that combines normalized error constraints with gradient smoothing to enhance highlight recovery. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale mobile Raw-HDR video dataset with per-frame HDR annotations. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results in all metrics, demonstrating superior spatial quality and temporal stability under extreme exposure conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/supeixian/RawHDRV.