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Tone mapping operator for high dynamic range video

University of British Columbia

High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology is emerging as the new revolution in digital media and has recently been adopted by industry as the new standard for capturing, transmitting and displaying video content. However, as the majority of the existing commercial displays is still only limited to the Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) technology, backward compatibility of HDR with these legacy displays is a topic of high importance. Over the years, several Tone Mapping Operators (TMOs) have been proposed to adapt HDR content, mainly images, to the SDR format. With the recent development of SDR displays, the need for video TMOs became essential. Direct application of image TMOs to HDR video content is not an efficient solution as they yield visual artifacts such as flickering, ghosting and brightness and color inconsistencies. In this thesis we propose an automated, low complexity content adaptive video TMO which delivers high quality, natural looking SDR content. The proposed method is based histogram equalization of perceptually quantized light information and smart distribution of HDR values in the limited SDR domain. Flickering introduced by the mapping process is reduced by our proposed flickering reduction method, while scene changes are detected by our approach, thus successfully maintaining the original HDR artistic intent. The low complexity of the proposed method along with the fact that it does not require any user interaction, make it a suitable candidate for real time applications, such as live broadcasting.

Text

2017-10-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/63406

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/