Temporal adaptation control for local tone mapping operator

Dragomir El Mezeni – Lazar Saranovac

   High dynamic range (HDR) imaging has gained great popularity over the past twenty years. Tone mapping operator (TMO) is the key component that enables reproduction of HDR images on the standard low dynamic range (LDR) display devices. When it comes to the HDR video, design of the TMO becomes especially challenging since temporal control of TMO parameters is needed in order to avoid possible artifacts. Since temporal and spatial contrast cannot be met simultaneously, existing solutions are usually designed to optimize one of these two requirements. We present novel local tone mapping operator that preserves details and simultaneously provides good local and global contrast of processed images. Tunable temporal control enables trade-off between spatial and temporal contrast of a tone mapped video. Flexible control presented in this paper ensures that both requirements can be met with a single operator just by using different tuning of the control block. When compared to the state-of-the-art TMOs, proposed solution exhibits better results regarding overall image quality.

Keywords: high dynamic range imaging, local tone mapping, video tone mapping, temporal coherency

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