HDR tone mapping algorithm based on difference compression with adaptive reference values

Abstract

Tone mapping remains a challenging problem since tone mapping operators need to produce high perceptual quality under all conditions. In this paper, we propose a new local tone mapping method based on difference compression with adaptive reference values, which can effectively reproduce the details of bright and shadow regions. We also use a global tone mapping method and blend the output images produced by the global and local methods based on objective quality metrics. To quantitatively measure output images, we developed a new objective quality metric for the tone mapped images. The proposed detailness metric measures detail loss in the bright and shadow regions, and shows good correlations with subjective quality. We combined this metric with the recently proposed tone mapped image quality index (TMQI) that may not sufficiently reflect the amount of local detail loss. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm provides better perceptual quality than existing methods.