46 research outputs found
A simplified HDR image processing pipeline for digital photography
High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging has revolutionized the digital imaging. It allows
capture, storage, manipulation, and display of full dynamic range of the captured scene.
As a result, it has spawned whole new possibilities for digital photography, from photorealistic
to hyper-real. With all these advantages, the technique is expected to replace
the conventional 8-bit Low Dynamic Range (LDR) imaging in the future. However,
HDR results in an even more complex imaging pipeline including new techniques for
capturing, encoding, and displaying images. The goal of this thesis is to bridge the
gap between conventional imaging pipeline to the HDR’s in as simple a way as possible.
We make three contributions. First we show that a simple extension of gamma
encoding suffices as a representation to store HDR images. Second, gamma as a control
for image contrast can be ‘optimally’ tuned on a per image basis. Lastly, we show
a general tone curve, with detail preservation, suffices to tone map an image (there is
only a limited need for the expensive spatially varying tone mappers). All three of our
contributions are evaluated psychophysically. Together they support our general thesis
that an HDR workflow, similar to that already used in photography, might be used. This
said, we believe the adoption of HDR into photography is, perhaps, less difficult than it
is sometimes posed to be
High Dynamic Range Visual Content Compression
This thesis addresses the research questions of High Dynamic Range (HDR) visual contents compression. The HDR representations are intended to represent the actual physical value of the light rather than exposed value. The current HDR compression schemes are the extension of legacy Low Dynamic Range (LDR) compressions, by using Tone-Mapping Operators (TMO) to reduce the dynamic range of the HDR contents. However, introducing TMO increases the overall computational complexity, and it causes the temporal artifacts. Furthermore, these compression schemes fail to compress non-salient region differently than the salient region, when Human Visual System (HVS)
perceives them differently. The main contribution of this thesis is to propose a novel Mapping-free visual saliency-guided HDR content compression scheme. Firstly, the relationship of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) lifting steps and TMO are explored. A novel approach to compress HDR image by Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) 2000 codec while backward compatible to LDR is proposed. This approach exploits the reversibility of tone mapping and scalability of DWT. Secondly, the importance of the TMO in the HDR compression is evaluated in this thesis. A mapping-free post HDR image compression based on JPEG and JPEG2000 standard codecs for current HDR image formats is proposed. This approach exploits the structure of HDR formats. It has an equivalent compression performance and the lowest computational complexity compared to the existing HDR lossy compressions (50% lower than the state-of-the-art). Finally, the shortcomings of the current HDR visual saliency models, and HDR visual saliency-guided compression are explored in this thesis. A spatial saliency model for HDR visual content outperform others
by 10% for spatial visual prediction task with 70% lower computational complexity is proposed. Furthermore, the experiment suggested more than 90% temporal saliency is predicted by the proposed spatial model. Moreover, the proposed saliency model can be used to guide the HDR compression by applying different quantization factor according to the intensity of predicted saliency map
AN INTEGER TONE MAPPING OPERATION FOR HDR IMAGES IN OPENEXR WITH DENORMALIZED NUMBERS
ABSTRACT We propose an integer tone mapping operator (TMO) for high dynamic range (HDR) images expressed in a floating-point data format. Two purposes are achieved by the proposed TMO. The first purpose is to implement a TMO with less memory space. The second purpose is to give an important step to realize a fixed-point TMO. The proposed TMO is available for HDR images in the OpenEXR format. The OpenEXR format has two numerical representations (the normalized number and the denormalized number) which are not in other HDR formats such as RGBE. These two numerical representations cause a problem in applying an integer TMO. The proposed method enables us to avoid the problem by using the intermediate format. Moreover, the exponent part and the mantissa part are processed separately as two integer numbers. As a result, an integer TMO with less numerical range is achieved by our method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can generate high-quality low dynamic range (LDR) images with less memory space. Index Terms-high dynamic range, tone mapping, OpenEXR, denormalized number, integer operatio
Objective and subjective assessment of perceptual factors in HDR content processing
The development of the display and camera technology makes high dynamic range (HDR) image become more and more popular. High dynamic range image give us pleasant image which has more details that makes high dynamic range image has good quality. This paper shows us the some important techniques in HDR images. And it also presents the work the author did. The paper is formed of three parts. The first part is an introduction of HDR image. From this part we can know why HDR image has good quality
Inverse tone mapping
The introduction of High Dynamic Range Imaging in computer graphics has produced a novelty
in Imaging that can be compared to the introduction of colour photography or even more.
Light can now be captured, stored, processed, and finally visualised without losing information.
Moreover, new applications that can exploit physical values of the light have been introduced
such as re-lighting of synthetic/real objects, or enhanced visualisation of scenes. However,
these new processing and visualisation techniques cannot be applied to movies and pictures
that have been produced by photography and cinematography in more than one hundred years.
This thesis introduces a general framework for expanding legacy content into High Dynamic
Range content. The expansion is achieved avoiding artefacts, producing images suitable for
visualisation and re-lighting of synthetic/real objects. Moreover, it is presented a methodology
based on psychophysical experiments and computational metrics to measure performances of
expansion algorithms. Finally, a compression scheme, inspired by the framework, for High
Dynamic Range Textures, is proposed and evaluated
Põhjalik uuring ülisuure dünaamilise ulatusega piltide toonivastendamisest koos subjektiivsete testidega
A high dynamic range (HDR) image has a very wide range of luminance levels that
traditional low dynamic range (LDR) displays cannot visualize. For this reason, HDR
images are usually transformed to 8-bit representations, so that the alpha channel for
each pixel is used as an exponent value, sometimes referred to as exponential notation
[43]. Tone mapping operators (TMOs) are used to transform high dynamic range to
low dynamic range domain by compressing pixels so that traditional LDR display can
visualize them. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and analyse differences and
similarities between the wide range of tone mapping operators that are available in the
literature. Each TMO has been analyzed using subjective studies considering different
conditions, which include environment, luminance, and colour. Also, several inverse
tone mapping operators, HDR mappings with exposure fusion, histogram adjustment,
and retinex have been analysed in this study. 19 different TMOs have been examined
using a variety of HDR images. Mean opinion score (MOS) is calculated on those selected
TMOs by asking the opinion of 25 independent people considering candidates’
age, vision, and colour blindness