On Improving the Pooling in HDR-VDP-2 towards Better HDR Perceptual Quality Assessment

Manish Narwaria (1) , Matthieu Perreira da Silva (1) , Patrick Le Callet (1) , Romuald Pépion (1)

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High Dynamic Range (HDR) signals capture much higher contrasts as compared to the traditional 8-bit low dynamic range (LDR) signals. This is achieved by representing the visual signal via values that are related to the real-world luminance, instead of gamma encoded pixel values which is the case with LDR. Therefore, HDR signals cover a larger luminance range and tend to have more visual appeal. However, due to the higher luminance conditions, the existing methods cannot be directly employed for objective quality assessment of HDR signals. For that reason, the HDR Visual Difference Predictor (HDR-VDP-2) has been proposed. HDR-VDP-2 is primarily a visibility prediction metric i.e. whether the signal distortion is visible to the eye and to what extent. Nevertheless, it also employs a pooling function to compute an overall quality score. This paper focuses on the pooling aspect in HDR-VDP-2 and employs a comprehensive database of HDR images (with their corresponding subjective ratings) to improve the prediction accuracy of HDR-VDP-2. We also discuss and evaluate the existing objective methods and provide a perspective towards better HDR quality assessment.

Mots clés: High Dynamic Range (HDR); perceptual quality; HDR-VDP-2

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

Manish Narwaria, Matthieu Perreira da Silva, Patrick Le Callet, Romuald Pépion. On Improving the Pooling in HDR-VDP-2 towards Better HDR Perceptual Quality Assessment. Human Vision and Electronic Imaging 2014, Feb 2014, San Francisco, United States. pp.1-6. ⟨hal-00951337⟩