TMO-Det: Deep tone-mapping optimized with and for object detection

Detecting objects in challenging illumination conditions is critical for autonomous driving. Existing solutions detect objects with standard or tone-mapped Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial approach that jointly optimizes tone-mapping (mapping High Dynamic Range (HDR) to LDR) and object detection. We analyze different ways to combine the feedback from tone-mapping quality and object detection quality for training such an adversarial network. We show that our deep tone-mapping operator jointly trained with an object detector achieves the best tone-mapping quality as well as detection quality compared to alternative approaches.