Pipelines for HDR Video Coding Based on Luminance Independent Chromaticity Preprocessing

Abstract

We consider the chromaticity in high dynamic range (HDR) video coding and show the advantages of a constant luminance color space for encoding. For this, we introduce two constant luminance HDR video coding pipelines, which convert the source video to linear $Y u^\prime v^\prime $ . A content dependent scaling of the chromaticity components serves as color quality parameter. This reduces perceivable color artifacts while remaining fully compatible with core High Efficiency Video Coding or other video coding standards. One of the pipelines further combines the scaling with a dedicated chromaticity transform to optimize the representation of the chromaticity components for encoding. We validate both pipelines with subjective user studies in addition to an objective comparison to the other state-of-the-art methods. The user studies show a significant improvement in perceived color quality at medium to high compression rates without sacrificing luminance quality compared with current standard coding pipelines. The objective evaluation suggests that both pipelines perform at least comparable to the current state-of-the-art methods.