Rendering of HDR content on LDR displays: An objective approach

Lukáš Krasula (1, 2) , Manish Narwaria (1) , Karel Fliegel (2) , Patrick Le Callet (1)

1 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes
2 CTU - Czech Technical University in Prague

Dynamic range compression (or tone mapping) of HDR content is an essential step towards rendering it on traditional LDR displays in a meaningful way. This is however non-trivial and one of the reasons is that tone mapping operators (TMOs) usually need content-specific parameters to achieve the said goal. While subjective TMO parameter adjustment is the most accurate, it may not be easily deployable in many practical applications. Its subjective nature can also influence the comparison of different operators. Thus, there is a need for objective TMO parameter selection to automate the rendering process. To that end, we investigate into a new objective method for TMO parameters optimization. Our method is based on quantification of contrast reversal and naturalness. As an important advantage, it does not require any prior knowledge about the input HDR image and works independently on the used TMO. Experimental results using a variety of HDR images and several popular TMOs demonstrate the value of our method in comparison to default TMO parameter settings.

Mots clés: HDR; tone mapping; parameter optimization; naturalness

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Multimédia [cs.MM]

Lukáš Krasula, Manish Narwaria, Karel Fliegel, Patrick Le Callet. Rendering of HDR content on LDR displays: An objective approach. SPIE Optics + Photonics, Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXVIII, Aug 2015, San Diego, United States. ⟨hal-01395520⟩