GiTMO: An HDR10 Compatible Generic Tone-Mapping for Real-Time Video Play

Abstract

Though the market of HDR displays for consumers is gaining maturity, low dynamic range (LDR) displays still hold a majority share in the consumer market. Many tone-mapping operators (TMO) have been developed to convert the HDR contents into a form suitable for LDR displays. This work proposes a generic tone-mapping operator (GiTMO) that can represent all global TMOs in a generic form of a one-dimensional array of a few coefficients. We use these coefficients and the existing HDR10 delivery pipeline to produce a tone-mapped version of the HDR content at the receiver end in real time. In our framework, coefficients are sent to the receiver as supplemental enhancement information (SEI) message of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Thus, HDR10, which is designed for HDR display, becomes compatible with LDR displays too. This can relieve the content producers from the need to release separate copies of HDR and LDR content. GiTMO, being generic and efficient, can generate LDR faithfully for all global TMOs, making the consumer end oblivious of the TMO used at the transmitter side. We perform extensive evaluations to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the GiTMO and the proposed content delivery format, and their benefits over the existing approaches.