On the perceptual similarity of realistic looking tone mapped High Dynamic Range images

Marcus Barkowsky (1) , Patrick Le Callet (1)

1 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes

High Dynamic Range (HDR) images are usually displayed on conventional Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays because of the limited availability of HDR displays. For the conversion of the large dynamic luminance range into the eight bit quantized values, parameterized Tone Mapping Operators (TMO) are applied. Human observers are able to optimize the parameters in order to get the highest Quality of Experience by judging the displayed LDR images on a realism scale. In the study presented in this paper, two TMOs with three parameters each were evaluated by observers in a subjective experiment. Although the chosen parameter settings vary largely, the chosen images appear to have the same QoE for the observers. In order to assess this similarity objectively, three commonly used image quality measurement algorithms were applied. Their agreement with the preference of the observers was analyzed and it was found that the Visual Difference Predictor (VDP) outperforms the Structural Similarity Index and the Root Mean Square Error. A threshold value for VDP is derived that indicates when two LDR images appear to have the same Quality of Experience.

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Marcus Barkowsky, Patrick Le Callet. On the perceptual similarity of realistic looking tone mapped High Dynamic Range images. 17th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2010, Sep 2010, Hong Kong SAR China. pp.3245 - 3248, ⟨10.1109/ICIP.2010.5651143⟩. ⟨hal-00616683v2⟩