Evaluation of HDR Tone Mapping

Methods
Using Essential Perceptual
Attributes
Motivation:
There exists several approaches to the issue of reproducing high dynamic range images
on devices with restricted dynamic range.
These approaches assume a thorough knowledge of both the objective and subjective
attributes of an image, but no comprehensive overview or analysis of such attributes has
been published.
A number of different tone mapping methods (operators) have been proposed in history.
However, also due to their sheer number, the advantages and disadvantages of these
methods are not immanently clear, and therefore a thorough and systematic comparison is
highly desirable.
Aim:
To present an overview about the effects of basic image attributes in HDR Tone Mapping.
Relationship between these attributes leading to the definition of an overall image quality
measure.(To prove this relationship: Subjective psychophysical experiment)
Evaluation of existing Tone Mapping methods.
Execution of with reference and without reference perceptual experiment to relate the
obtained subjective results.

Introduction:
In order to conduct a comparison of TM methods, it is
necessary to settle upon a set of image attributes by which
the images produced by the methods should be judged.
These attributes are not independent, and their
interrelationships and the influence on the overall image
quality need to be carefully analyzed.
The perceived quality of the images produced by particular
TM methods with and without the possibility of direct
comparison to the original real-world scenes is investigated.
The evaluation of the attributes and their relationships lead
to the definition of an Overall Image Quality. This metric can
be used to judge how well a given TM method is able to
produce naturally looking images.

Overall Image Quality And Image Attributes:

It was observed that the overall image quality is not determined
by a single attribute, but rather a composition of them.
Three approaches for the presentation of an Image:
1. Perceptual (overall image quality)

2. Cognitive (image details)

3. Aesthetical (pleasant appearance)
We concentrate on the perceptual approach, and aim to
characterize the overall image quality resulting from a TM
technique in a perceptual sense.
The goal of this work is to investigate the influence these
attributes have on overall image quality, based on a subjective
study.

Overall Image Quality And Image Attributes:

Five Image attributes:
1. Brightness (measures the subjective sensation produced
by the
absolute amount of luminance)
2. Contrast (variations in image luminance)
3. Color (a correct reproduction of colors can increase the
apparent
realism of an output image)
4. Details
5. Artifacts (the effort to reproduce details well is a potential
cause of
artifacts)

Subjective perceptual studies:

Two separate and technically different subjective perceptual
studies:
1. A rating-based experiment with reference real-world scenes
2. A ranking-based experiment with no references

to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of 14 TM methods

The results concerning the relations of image attributes and
overall perceptual quality of an image are totally independent
on any particular TM method or on the values of its parameters.
Total 3(scenes) (10+10)(subjects) 6(attributes) 14(methods)
= 5040 values of observation scores were collected.
Subjects were asked to rate/rank according to the overall image
quality and reproduction of basic attributes on the basis of
quality of reproduction not quantity.

Results and discussion:

A rating observation vector X is converted to the rank vector X to make
the results of the two experiments comparable.
Effects of input scenes and methods:
1. According to the Friedmans non-parametric two-way analysis of
variance (ANOVA) test no statistically significant differences between
the three input scenes were found.
2. But with the same test significant differences between the method
scores for all attributes and both experiments were found and we can
proceed with the evaluation of TM methods.
Effect of the experimental setup:
To examine the differences between two experiments a number of tests
were used e.g. Kruskal - Wallis test, Profile analysis, MANOVA. But all the
tests show that the factors subject, input scene and experimental
setup are statistically not significant, i.e. scenes, subjects and types of
experiment do not have a significant effect on the resulting scores.

Results and discussion:

Interaction effects found a significant effect of input
scene TM method, but couldnt find a statistical
difference between the two experiments.
It suggests that for a perceptual comparison of TM
methods it is sufficient to use ranking without a
reference experimental setup.

Results and discussion:

Evaluation of HDR Tone Mapping Methods:
All evaluations are targeted at the perceptual dimension of TM i.e. to
reproduce the visual sensation of the real scenes as closely as
possible.
Quality of reproduction was the main focus e.g. too few and too many
details were both rated worse than the right amount of details.
Overall Results: The best overall quality is generally observed in
images produced by global TM methods as the HVS is evidently
highly sensitive to any disruptive factors in the overall image
attributes, far more than to the absence of some image details.
Comparison of the two experiments(visualized along with linear
fit and coefficients of determination R2): The highest agreement
between two experiments is for overall contrast, overall image
quality and for the lack of artifacts attribute.

Results and discussion:

Evaluation of HDR Tone Mapping Methods:
Comparison of the results for input scenes: Similar trends were
found in results for the two outdoor scenes (outdoor and night scene),
while the indoor scene exhibits a slightly different pattern (there is a
higher stress on reproduction of details in this case).
Overall image quality and relationships of attributes: To analyze
the dependencies of overall image quality on the five evaluated attributes
we used the simplest approach, multivariate linear regression:
OIQ = 0.07 Bri + 0.37 Con + 0.06 Det + 0.36 Col + 0.21 Art
=> R2 = 0.76, pBri = 0.8624, pCon < 0.0001, pDet = 0.0390, pCol <
0.0001, pArt < 0.0001.
The only p-value that is higher than the threshold 0.05 is the brightness
attribute, which means that the reproduction of brightness does not
significantly influence the model. It means that the impact of brightness
quality spreads into the other attributes, it reveals itself only indirectly.

Conclusions:
The presented overview of image attributes is helpful for getting
into the tone mapping field, or when implementing or developing a
new tone mapping method.
Our results show that the quality of reproduction of overall
brightness, overall contrast and colors is much more important
than the reproduction of details when naturalness is ranked in real
scenes.
Good performance of global methods is the most surprising and
important result of the study. The result may be sometimes
enhanced using a local part that does not vanish in the global
trend.
Image quality attributes can be evaluated without a real HDR
references.
Represents objective comparison metric for HDR images.

Tone-mapping high dynamic range images by

novel histogram adjustment
Motivation:
The need for fast and automatic tone mapping operators which
can effectively and efficiently compress high dynamic range
scene to display on low dynamic range devices such that the
reproduced images look pleasing and evoke our visual
experiences in the original HDR scenes .
Aim:

To reproduce HDR radiance maps on LDR devices, i.e. to

convert 32-bit floating-point values to 8-bit integer values in
such a way that the visual impressions and feature details of
the original real scenes are still faithfully reproduced.

Introduction:
Tone reproduction techniques for compressing dynamic range are
usually described in two broad categories:
Global and Local tone mapping operators.
A novel fast global histogram adjustment based tone mapping
operator, which effectively utilizes the full dynamic range of
display and thus well reproduces global contrast for high dynamic
range images is proposed.
But when viewing high dynamic range scenes, the local adaptation
mechanism in human visual system helps us to see the details in
all parts in the scenes. So, a technique is developed which
segments the images and carries out adaptive contrast adjustment
using our developed global tone mapping operator in the local
areas so that each local area can better utilize the full dynamic
range of the display and at the same time avoid noise artifacts.

Global Tone Mapping Operator:

Applying the logarithm function to luminance increases the
contrast and brightness for the low luminance values while
compressing the higher luminance values.
As an initial step, we use the following function:

c controls the overall brightness of the mapped image.

The choice of t is a trial and error process, in order to avoid this
difficulty, we propose an approach to automatically set the
parameter.

Global Tone Mapping Operator:

Problem with the above equation: Although the overall brightness

of the mapped image can be appropriately set, the mapped images

do not have sufficient details and appear with low contrast.
Reason: Quantization is done purely on the basis of the actual pixel
values without taking into account the images pixel distribution
characteristics.
Solution: A traditional technique that takes into account pixel
distribution is histogram equalization. Division of the intervals is
purely based on the pixel population distributions and the actual pixel
arent taken into account. The drawbacks of linear quantization and
histogram equalization are compensated by each other.
We present a global tone mapping operator called histogram
adjustment based linear to equalized quantizer (HALEQ) to perform
the mapping .

Global Tone Mapping Operator:

HALEQ: the range of D(I) is cut at le1, le2,,leN1, which satisfy

the following relation:

len = ln + (en - ln) , controls the contrast enhancement
level in
the mapping process.
This method overcomes the drawbacks of linear quantization
and histogram equalization and offers a more comprehensive and flexible histogram adjustment solution to the
mapping of HDR images.
Problem with HALEQ: Despite these advantages, the
HALEQ technique described above has the common drawback
of global tone mapping operators, i.e. the mapped images still
lack local contrast and details.

Local Tone Mapping Operator:

Experiment on human visual response stated that higher
luminance points can be perceived darker than lower ones
when they are located in different adaptation levels. Also, the
results showed that different luminance intervals could result
in overlapped reactions on the limited response range of the
visual system, thus extending our visual response range to
cope with the full dynamic range of high contrast scenes.
If we can segment the image into small regions and apply
HALEQ in each local area, each area would have a full display
dynamic range to utilize based on its local pixel statistics. This
is equivalent to extending the limited display dynamic range.
Local regions may obtain larger display dynamic range, and
they might overlap with each other.

Local Tone Mapping Operator:

We aim at providing a fast local operator, so we simply
divide the image into non-overlapping regular
rectangular blocks. Based on the pixel statistics in each
block, we compute local HALEQn in the same way as in
the global case.
We regard HALEQn as a mapping function:
d(x ,y) = HALEQn[D( x, y)]

The images mapped using local HALEQ show more

details and local contrast in either dark or bright regions.
However, the direct application of HALEQ in each
independent local area causes sharp jumps among
different blocks called Boundary Artifacts.

Local Tone Mapping Operator:

For each pixel value D(x,y) in the image, the final mapped
pixel value is the weighted average of the results from
tone mapping functions:

d controls the smoothness of the image. The larger the

value of d, the smaller the influence of dn when
calculating wd. Setting the boundary smoothing factor d
to larger values results in an image free from boundary
artifacts but with less local contrast.

Local Tone Mapping Operator:

Issues related to Local Tone Mapping:
1. Contrast enhancement approaches can introduce noise in
uniform areas when the enhancement level is too large.
Manipulating contrast using HALEQ, beta controls the
enhancement level. So, an adaptive approach for determining
the values of parameter beta is necessary in order to avoid
noise artifacts in uniform areas.

2. The halo artifacts that arise when objects contour neighbor

uniform areas. This is mainly due to the nature of the distance
weighting function. To deal with this problem we add a
similarity weighting function which increases the chance that
similar pixels in uniform areas are mapped to similar values.

Conclusion:
A property of our ALHA tone mapping operator is that the
derivation of the tone mapping functions in different blocks is
independent of each other and the weighting process for each
pixel only associates with 5*5 neighboring elements.
HALEQ only takes about 0.1 s to compute a 1024*768 pixel
image on a T7300 with 2.0 GHz CPU. To map a 1024*768 pixel
image on a T7300 with 2.0 GHz CPU takes about 0.4s using our
ALHA operator.
The image quality produced using the algorithm would not vary
considerably for various image contents and gives consistent
nice-rendering results. This means that the algorithm has better
automation to produce good tone mapped images in comparison
with other mapping techniques. Thus this algorithm is more
suitable for automatical batch processing purpose.

VISUAL ATTENTION IN LDR AND HDR

IMAGES
Motivation:
Many issues that are considered as being resolved for
conventional low dynamic range (LDR) images pose new
challenges in HDR context. One of such issues is human visual
attention, which has important applications in image processing.
However, the impact of HDR imaging on visual attention and on
the performance of saliency models is not well understood.
Aim:
To understand the influence on the human visual attention when
a conventional LDR image is replaced with an HDR image.
Similarity analysis of FDMs for LDR and HDR images to
understand if there is a difference in visual attention.

Introduction
Performed eye tracking experiments and obtained fixation
density maps, which demonstrate a significant difference in
the way HDR and LDR capture attention of the observers.
Fixation density maps (FDMs), which represent the level of
attention at certain locations, are computed by convolving
the recorded gaze points with a Gaussian filter, and then
normalizing the result by the peak amplitude of the map
into the range of 0 to 1.
The similarity score is a distribution-based metric of how
similar two saliency maps are. If a similarity score is one,
the two saliency maps are the same, if it is zero, the maps
do not overlap at all.

Conclusion
Three clusters were manually created:
Change in Visual Attention: While results show that viewers tend
to look more at the bright objects in LDR images, details in the dark
regions become more visible in HDR, resulting in the increased
visual attention in these areas.
Change in Fixation Intensity: The HDR FDM is mostly a
modulated version of the LDR FDM, i.e., viewers looked at the same
objects in both cases but with a different intensity.
No Change: Some contents did not show any significant difference
between LDR and HDR FDMs.
The eye tracking test demonstrated that FDMs of HDR images for
some scenes are significantly different from the FDMs of the
corresponding LDR versions.