Blind Quality Assessment of Tone-Mapped Images Considering Colorfulness, Naturalness, and Structure

Abstract

Nowadays, high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging represents a prevailing trend and attracts much attention from both academic and industrial scholars. Since HDR images cannot be properly produced on the mainstream low-dynamic-range (LDR) displays, various tone-mapping operators or postprocessing technologies have been designed to transform HDR images into LDR images for visualization on LDR displays. However, it inevitably induces artifacts and distortions due to dynamic range compression. Besides, existing tone-mapped (TM) technologies cannot effectively handle all kinds of images with diverse contents and structures, leaving to a very challenging and urgent image quality assessment (IQA) problem. To cope with this challenge, in this paper, an effective blind quality assessment approach for TM images is proposed through a comprehensive consideration of their characteristics. More specifically, to dig out sufficient information from TM images, multiple quality-sensitive features are captured to fully represent different attributes, including colorfulness, naturalness, and structure. The connection between feature space and associated subjective ratings is established via a regression model. Extensive experiments on a recently released TM image database prove that the proposed approach is superior to the state-of-the-art no-reference IQA approaches.