FastGaMer: Efficient GainMap Learning for Practical Inverse Tone Mapping

Inverse tone mapping (ITM) becomes significantly harder when the SDR input is produced by local tone mapping, which jointly applies global radiometric compression and spatially varying adaptations that distort dynamic range, contrast, and channel-wise color ratios. Existing ITM methods ignore this degradation structure and either regress HDR values directly or rely on a single-channel gain map, which scale luminance only and cannot restore the compressed dynamic range and wide color gamut. We introduce FastGaMer, a structured and resolution-agnostic ITM framework that explicitly mirrors this degradation process. Instead of regressing HDR values, we reconstruct a color gain map, which preserves per-channel amplification, simplifies learning, and enables proper gamut extension. Local and global degradations are inverted separately using dynamic bilateral grids and learnable 3D LUTs, followed by a lightweight neural modulator for global refinement and coherence. All high-resolution operations are network-free, yielding exceptional efficiency. To support color-GM supervision under realistic local TMO degradations, we create a dataset of over 8,000 4K SDR-GM pairs with an additional real-captured test set. FastGaMer outperforms prior lightweight ITM methods by +1.4 dB PQ-PSNR, reduces runtime by 70%, and processes 4K images in only 6.2 ms, achieving both high accuracy and real-time performance.