A survey on applications of high dynamic range technologies in consumer electronic devices

Abstract

High dynamic range (HDR) technology is one of various research topics in computer vision technologies, which has been actively being applied to cutting-edge consumer electronics products such as premium UHDTV, premium smart phones and etc. In case of consumer camera devices or mobile camera phones, HDR scene capture mode is commonly provided by combining differently-exposed images with standard dynamic range (SDR). In consumer premium TVs, there exist two kinds of HDR processing technologies: one is a tone mapping (TM) to render HDR content on SDR display, and the other one is an inverse tone mapping (iTM) to render a SDR content on HDR display. Especially, in the case of HDR ton mapping, some metadata for adjusting radiometric difference between a reference mastering display and various consumer TV displays were standardized as well as HDR signal encoding method. Currently there exist various organizations related to HDR standards: UHD-Alliance, SMPTE, CTA, ITU-R, MPEG, DVB and etc. Those HDR standard ecosystem members include movie studio, broadcasting, OTTs, TV/STB manufacturers, and etc. They have made efforts to create a next big opportunity of brand-new HDR technology on the basis of 4K UHD media. We will here review HDR technologies, standards, delivery system, and its CE industry trends.