Performance evaluation of single layer HDR video transmission pipelines

Abstract

Thanks to the recent developments in both High Dynamic Range (HDR) content creation and HDR consumer displays, HDR technology is now mature enough for consumer TV broadcasting. Considering that HDR displays have been introduced to the consumer market just recently, backward compatible broadcasting approaches that can also address the Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) displays are preferred during this transition period. While several backward compatible single layer approaches have been proposed for HDR content delivery, there is no comprehensive study on the subjective quality of the delivered content on both SDR and HDR displays. In this work, we investigate the performance of two single layer HDR delivery pipelines, namely HDR10 and SDR10 through three sets of subjective test experiments. The effect of different video preprocessing and post-processing methods used in the HDR10 and SDR10 pipelines on the visual quality of the HDR and SDR outputs is investigated in these comprehensive tests. The analysis of the results shows that the HDR10 pipeline can achieve superior HDR quality compared to that of the SDR10 while the SDR subjective quality of the HDR10 pipeline is comparable to that of the SDR10 pipeline. Therefore, it is concluded that HDR10 can be used as a backward compatible single layer pipeline addressing both HDR and SDR displays. It is also shown in this work that by addressing the display in 4:4:4 mode, the SDR subjective quality of the HDR10 pipeline is further improved compared to the 4:2:0 mode. The findings of this work can be used as guidelines for addressing both HDR and SDR displays with HDR10 pipeline.