Abstract
Recently, high dynamic range (HDR) imaging has received significant attention from research community as well as the industrial companies due to valuable applications of HDR images in better visualization and analysis. However, HDR images need to be converted to low dynamic range (LDR) images for viewing on standard LDR display screens. Several tone-mapping operators have been proposed for the conversion, however, so far, no significant works have been reported employing artificial intelligence to achieve better enhancement of the output images. In this paper, we present an optimization-based approach, to enhance the quality of the tone-mapped LDR images using metaheuristics. More specifically, the optimization process is based on the differential evolution (DE) algorithm which takes tone-mapping function of an existing histogram-based method as initial guess and refines the histogram bins iteratively leading to progressive enhancement of the quality of LDR image. The final results produced by the proposed optimized histogram-based approach (OHbA) showed better performance compared to the existing state-of-the-art tone-mapping algorithms.
Highlights
The human visual system (HVS) can adapt to the high dynamic range (HDR) of natural and synthetic scenes for viewing details of the dark and bright regions
Tone-Mapping Quality Index For evaluation purposes, we rely on the metric called tonemapped image quality index, Tone Mapping Quality Index (TMQI)
The images of high dynamic range cannot be viewed with full details on the existing displays, because the range of the screens is much less than of the captured images
Summary
The human visual system (HVS) can adapt to the high dynamic range (HDR) of natural and synthetic scenes for viewing details of the dark and bright regions. The capturing of devices, such as commonly used cameras, suffer from sensor limitations and loss of precision in the quantization process for storing on digital media [1,2] This is to say that the images captured with standard cameras and displayed on standard screens have lower quality than the actual scene viewed by the human eye. We utilize a metaheuristic algorithm with a recently proposed TMO, referred by the authors as Adaptive Threshold vs Intensity based TMO, or ATT in short [18], to produce tone-mapped LDR images of high quality.
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