Tone mapping using color correction function and image decomposition in high dynamic range imaging

Tone-mapping-operators (TMOs) provide a useful means for converting high dynamic range (HDR) images to low dynamic range (LDR) images so that they can be viewed on standard displays, but this may influence the visual quality of experience (QoE) of the end-user. There is a need to understand the impact of TMOs to inform the choice of TMO algorithms for different displays, especially for small-screen-devices (SSDs) such as those used in mobile phones. This is important, as mobile devices are becoming the primary means of consuming multimedia contents. However, few studies have been undertaken to assess the impact of TMOs and viewing devices (especially SSDs) on the visual QoE of the user when using. In this chapter, we evaluate subjectively and objectively, the commonly used TMOs in different displays and resolutions for colour and grey-scale HDR images. Our results show that viewing devices have an influence on the TMOs performance, suggesting the need for a careful choice of TMO to enhance the viewing-QoE of the end-user. As expected, the higher resolution, the better HDR-image quality. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference between the Mean of Opinion Score (MOS) scores for colour and grey-scale images in SSDs. The device and TMOs affect QoE for colour and grey HDR-image equally. We found Shannon entropy (SE) to be a good objective measure of quality for colour and grey HDR images, suggesting that entropy may find use in automated HDR quality control assessment schemes, while; HDR-VDP-2 is a good objective measure for colour HDR image only.

The present paper proposes a blind multi-bit watermarking method for High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. The proposed approach is designed in order to guarantee the watermark imperceptibility both in the HDR marked image and in its Low Dynamic Range (LDR) counterpart, being thus robust against significant non-linear distortions such as those performed by tone-mapping operators (TMOs). In order to do so, the wavelet transform of the Just Noticeable Difference (JND)- scaled space of the original HDR image is employed as embedding domain. Moreover, a visual mask taking into account specific aspects of the Human Visual System (HVS) is exploited to improve the quality of the resulting watermarked image. Specifically, bilateral filtering is used to locate information on the detail part of the HDR image, where the watermark should be preferably embedded. A contrast sensitivity function is also employed to modulate the watermark intensity in each wavelet decomposition subband according to its scale and orientation. An extensive set of experimental results testifies the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in embedding multi-bit watermarks into HDR images without affecting the visual quality of the original image, while being robust against TMOs.

Tone mapping (TM) algorithms reproduce the high dynamic range (HDR) images on low dynamic range (LDR) display devices such as monitors or printers. In this paper, we propose a local TM algorithm, in which the HDR input is segmented using the K-means algorithm and a display gamma parameter is set automatically for each segmented region. The proposed TM algorithm computes the luminance of an input that is the radiance map generated from a set of LDR images acquired with varying exposure settings. Then, according to the bilateral filtered luminance, an image is divided into a number of regions using the K-means algorithm. The display gamma value is set automatically according to the mean value of each region. Then, the tone of HDR image is reproduced by a local TM method with adaptive gamma value. We generate the tone-mapped image using the proposed local TM. Computer simulation with real LDR images shows the effectiveness of the proposed local TM algorithm in terms of the visual quality as well as the local contrast. It can be used for contrast and color enhancement in various display and acquisition devices.

International audience

High dynamic range (HDR) images are becoming pervasive due to capturing or rendering of a wider range of luminance, but their special display equipment is difficult to be popularized because of high cost and technological problem. Thus, HDR images must be adapted to the conventional display devices by applying tone mapping (TM) operation, which puts forward higher requirements for intellectual property protection of HDR images. As the robustness presents regional diversity in the low dynamic range (LDR) watermarked image after TM, which is different from the traditional watermarking technologies, a concept of watermarking activity is defined and used to distinguish the essential distinction of watermarking between LDR image and HDR image in this paper. Then, a novel robust HDR image watermarking algorithm is proposed against TM operations. Firstly, based on the hybrid processing of redundant discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition, the watermark is embedded by modifying the structure information of the HDR image. Distinguished from LDR image watermarking, the high embedding strength can cause more obvious distortion in the high brightness regions of HDR image than the low brightness regions. Thus, a perceptual brightness mask with low complexity is designed to improve the imperceptibility further. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust to the existing TM operations, with taking into account the imperceptibility and embedded capacity, which is superior to the current state-of-art HDR image watermarking algorithms.

In this paper, we present a Double-Anchoring Based Tone Mapping (DABTM) algorithm for displaying high dynamic range (HDR) images. First, two anchoring values are obtained using the double-anchoring theory. Second, we use the two values to formulate the compressing operator, which can achieve the aim of tone mapping directly. A new method based on accelerated K-means for the decomposition of HDR images into groups (frameworks) is proposed. Most importantly, a group of piecewise-overlap linear functions is put forward to define the belongingness of pixels to their locating frameworks. Experiments show that our algorithm is capable of achieving dynamic range compression, while preserving fine details and avoiding common artifacts such as gradient reversals, halos, or loss of local contrast.

A fixed-point tone mapping operation (TMO) instead of a floating-point TMO is proposed in this paper. A TMO generates a low dynamic range (LDR) image from a high dynamic range (HDR) image. Since pixel values of an HDR image are generally expressed in a floating-point data format, e.g. RGBE and OpenEXR, a TMO is also implemented in floating-point arithmetic in conventional approaches. However, it requires a huge computational cost, even though a resulting LDR image is expressed in simple integers. The proposed TMO is implemented with only fixed-point arithmetic. As a result, the proposed method reduces a computational cost. Experimental results shows the PSNR of LDR images in the proposed method are comparable to those of the conventional methods.

A number of successful tone mapping operators for contrast compression have been proposed due to the need to visualize high dynamic range (HDR) images on low dynamic range devices. They were inspired by fields as diverse as image processing, photographic practice, and modeling of the human visual systems (HVS). The variety of approaches calls for a systematic perceptual evaluation of their performance. We conduct a psychophysical experiment based on a direct comparison between the appearance of real-world scenes and HDR images of these scenes displayed on a low dynamic range monitor. In our experiment, HDR images are tone mapped by seven existing tone mapping operators. The primary interest of this psychophysical experiment is to assess the differences in how tone mapped images are perceived by human observers and to find out which attributes of image appearance account for these differences when tone mapped images are compared directly with their corresponding real-world scenes rather than with each other. The human subjects rate image naturalness, overall contrast, overall brightness, and detail reproduction in dark and bright image regions with respect to the corresponding real-world scene. The results indicate substantial differences in perception of images produced by individual tone mapping operators. We observe a clear distinction between global and local operators in favor of the latter, and we classify the tone mapping operators according to naturalness and appearance attributes.

Recently, the standardization of backward compatible JPEG image coding for high dynamic range (HDR) image has been undertaken to establish an international standard called “JPEG XT.” The JPEG XT consists of two layers: the base layer and the residual layer. The base layer contains tone mapped low dynamic range (LDR) image data and the residual layer contains the error signal used to reconstruct the HDR image. This paper gives the result of a study to evaluate the overall performance of tone mapping operators (TMOs) for this standard. The evaluation is performed using five HDR image datasets and six TMOs for profiles A, B, and C of the proposed JPEG XT standard. The Tone Mapped image Quality Index (TMQI) and no reference image quality assessment (NR IQA) are used for measuring the LDR image quality. The peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is used to evaluate the overall compression performance of JPEG XT profiles A, B, and C. In TMQI and NR IQA measurements, TMOs using display adaptive tone mapping and adaptive logarithmic mapping each gave good results. A TMO using adaptive logarithmic mapping gave good PSNRs.

In this paper we present a new technique for the display of High Dynamic Range (HDR) images on Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays. The described process has three stages. First, the input image is segmented into luminance zones. Second, the tone mapping operator (TMO) that performs better in each zone is automatically selected. Finally, the resulting tone mapping (TM) outputs for each zone are merged, generating the final LDR output image. To establish the TMO that performs better in each luminance zone we conducted a preliminary psychophysical experiment using a set of HDR images and six different TMOs. We validated our composite technique on several (new) HDR images and conducted a further psychophysical experiment, using an HDR display as reference, that establishes the advantages of our hybrid three-stage approach over a traditional individual TMO.

This paper proposes a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image Tone Mapping (TM) approach converting HDR images into Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images so as the tone mapped HDR images ensure good visual quality on LDR display devices in accordance with the observers’ assessment. The proposed algorithm adjusts the logarithm luminance distribution of the HDR image according to a perceptual quantizer with respect to the Human Visual System (HVS) using a piecewise linear function. The parameters’s approximation are induced by L M -norms (l 1 , l 2 , l ∞ ) and the performance of the proposed algorithm is discussed. Simulation results provide good results, both in terms of visual quality and TMQI metric, compared to existing competitive TM approaches.

High dynamic range (HDR) photography is an emerging technology that has the potential to dramatically enhance the visual quality and realism of digital photos. One of the key technical challenges of HDR photography is displaying HDR photos on conventional devices through tone mapping or dynamic range compression. Although many different tone mapping techniques have been developed in recent years, evaluating tone mapping operators prove to be extremely difficult. Web2.0, social media and crowd-sourcing are emerging Internet technologies which can be harnessed to harvest the brain power of the mass to solve difficult problems in science, engineering and businesses. Paired comparison is used in the scientific study of preferences and attitudes and has been shown to be capable of obtaining an interval-scale ordering of items along a psychometric dimension such as preference or importance. In this paper, we exploit these technologies for evaluating HDR tone mapping algorithms. We have developed a Web2.0 style system that enables Internet users from anywhere to evaluate tone mapped HDR photos at any time. We adopt a simple paired comparison protocol, Internet users are presented a pair of tone mapped images and are simply asked to select the one that they think is better or click a "no difference" button. These user inputs are collected in the web server and analyzed by a rank aggregation algorithm which ranks the tone mapped photos according to the votes they received. We present experimental results which demonstrate that the emerging Internet technologies can be exploited as a new paradigm for evaluating HDR tone mapping algorithms. The advantages of this approach include the potential of collecting large user inputs under a variety of viewing environments rather than limited user participation under controlled laboratory environments thus enabling more robust and reliable quality assessment. We also present data analysis to correlate user generated qualitative indices with quantitative image statistics which may provide useful guidance for developing better tone mapping operators.

An image appearance model called iCAM06 was designed for high dynamic range (HDR) image rendering. The dynamic range of an HDR image needs to be mapped on output devices, which is called tone compression or tone mapping. The iCAM06, the representative HDR rendering algorithm, uses tone compression for image reproduction on the low dynamic range of output devices. However, color saturation reduction occurs during its tone compression process. We propose a saturation correction method using the inverse compensation in order to recover the saturation reduction in the iCAM06. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than the iCAM06 from the viewpoint of saturation accuracy and rendering preference.

Tone mapping operators (TMO) are functions that map high dynamic range (HDR) images to a standard dynamic range (SDR), while aiming to preserve the perceptual cues of a scene that govern its visual quality. Despite the increasing number of studies on quality assessment of tone mapped images, current subjective quality datasets have relatively small numbers of images and subjective opinions. Moreover, existing challenges in transferring laboratory experiments to crowdsourcing platforms put a barrier for collecting large-scale datasets through crowdsourcing. In this work, we address these challenges and propose the RealVision-TMO (RV-TMO), a large-scale tone mapped image quality dataset. RV-TMO contains 250 unique HDR images, their tone mapped versions obtained using four TMOs and pairwise comparison results from seventy unique observers for each pair. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest dataset available in the literature for quality evaluation of TMOs by the number of tone mapped images and number of annotations. Furthermore, we provide a content selection strategy to identify interesting and challenging HDR images. We also propose a novel methodology for observer screening in pairwise experiments. Our work does not only provide annotated data to benchmark existing objective quality metrics, but also paves the path to building new metrics for tone mapping quality evaluation.

We conduct a series of experiments to investigate the desired properties of a tone mapping operator (TMO) and to design such an operator based on subjective data. We propose a novel approach to the tone mapping problem, in which the tone mapping parameters are determined based on the data from subjective experiments, rather than an image processing algorithm or a visual model. To collect this data, a series of experiments are conducted in which the subjects adjust three generic TMO parameters: brightness, contrast and color saturation. In two experiments, the subjects are to find a) the most preferred image without a reference image (preference task) and b) the closest image to the real‐world scene which the subjects are confronted with (fidelity task). We analyze subjects’ choice of parameters to provide more intuitive control over the parameters of a tone mapping operator. Unlike most of the researched TMOs that focus on rendering for standard low dynamic range monitors, we consider a broad range of potential displays, each offering different dynamic range and brightness. We simulate capabilities of such displays on a high dynamic range (HDR) display. This allows us to address the question of how tone mapping needs to be adjusted to accommodate displays with drastically different dynamic ranges.Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.8 [Computer Graphics]: High dynamic range images, Visual perception, Tone mapping