Quality Measurement for High Dynamic Range Omnidirectional Image Systems

Abstract

From the perspective of optimizing the visual experience of the omnidirectional system, this article explores the terminal image quality of the high dynamic range omnidirectional image (HOI) system for the first time. The HOI system has higher contrast and wider field of view perception, but its complex imaging process poses a challenge to quality measurement. In this article, we propose a novel quality measurement method for HOI (QM-HOI) system based on distortion perception and brain information-processing mechanism. Because HOI system may encounter single distortion or mixed distortion, the proposed method consists of two modules, i.e., local progressive distortion model (LPDM) and global mixed distortion model (GMDM). LPDM is designed to mainly extract local features based on the different perception effects that tone mapping (TM) operators impart to coding distortion in different luminance regions. GMDM is designed to jointly consider the structure distortion caused by coding and the color distortion of TM. The extracted features are formed into feature vectors to predict the visual quality of the distorted HOIs. A new HOI subjective evaluation dataset with multidistortion is established, called NBU-HOID, specialized for the design and testing of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the objective measurement results of the proposed method is better than the state-of-the-art methods, and more in line with the human perception. We will also provide the NBU-HOID dataset free of charge shortly afterward.