A fixed-point tone mapping operation for HDR images in the RGBE format

Abstract

A fixed-point tone mapping operation (TMO) instead of a floating-point TMO is proposed in this paper. A TMO generates a low dynamic range (LDR) image from a high dynamic range (HDR) image. Since pixel values of an HDR image are generally expressed in a floating-point data format, e.g. RGBE and OpenEXR, a TMO is also implemented in floating-point arithmetic in conventional approaches. However, it requires a huge computational cost, even though a resulting LDR image is expressed in simple integers. The proposed TMO is implemented with only fixed-point arithmetic. As a result, the proposed method reduces a computational cost. Experimental results shows the PSNR of LDR images in the proposed method are comparable to those of the conventional methods.