Auto-Exposure Control using Loop-Up Table Based on Scene-Luminance Curve in Mobile Phone Camera
Tae-Hyoug Lee, Wang-Jun Kyung, Cheol Hee Lee, Yeong‐Ho Ha · Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea · 2010
Auto-exposure control automatically calculates and adjusts the exposure for consecutive input image. Recently, this is usually controlled by the sensor gain, however, unsuitable control causes oscillation of luminance for sonsecutive input images, called as flickering. Also, in mobile phone cameras, only simple information, such as the average luminance value, can be utilized due to coarse performance. Therefore, this paper presents a new real-time AE control method using a Look Up Table(LUT) based on Scene-Luminance curves to avoid the generation of flickering. Prior to the AE control, a LUT is constructed, which illustrates the characteristic of outputs for input patches corresponding to sensor gains. The AE control is first performed by estimating a current scene as a patch using the proposed LUT. A new sensor gain is then estimated using also LUT with previously estimated patch. The entire estimation process is performed using linear interpolation to achieve real-time execution. Based on experimental results, the proposed AE control is demonstrated with real-time, flicker-free.