Joint feature tracking and radiometric calibration from auto-exposure video

To capture the full brightness range of natural scenes, cameras automatically adjust the exposure value which causes the brightness of scene points to change from frame to frame. Given such a video sequence, we introduce a new method for tracking features and estimating the radiometric response function of the camera and the exposure difference between frames simultaneously. We model the global and nonlinear process that is responsible for the changes in image brightness rather than adapting to the changes locally and linearly which makes our tracking more robust to the change in brightness. The radiometric response function and the exposure difference between frames are also estimated in the process which enables further video processing algorithms to deal with the varying brightness.