Rate–distortion optimization of multi-exposure image coding for high dynamic range image coding

Abstract

High dynamic range (HDR) images have many practical applications because they offer an extended dynamic range and a more realistic visual experience. A HDR image is usually stored in floating-point format, so pre-processing is required to make the HDR image compatible with coding standards. A transfer function is also used to achieve better coding efficiency. Typically, HDR images are generated using several low dynamic range (LDR) images with different exposures. Instead of compressing the HDR image when it is generated from images with multiple exposures, this study proposes a technique to compress the multi-exposure images. The HDR image generation, as well as the multi-exposure images fusion, can be realized in the decoder. The proposed framework encodes the multi-exposure images using MV-HEVC where the inter-view redundancy is well exploited when an accurate intensity-mapping function between the multi-exposure images has been established. Multi-exposure image coding is used to produce a high-quality HDR image so the rate–distortion optimization (RDO) is modified by considering both the reconstruction quality of the current block and its effect on the multi-exposure fused image. A Lagrange multiplier is modified to maintain a balance between the rate and the modified distortion during the RDO process. Compared to encoding the generated HDR image using HEVC range extension, the experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves significant bitrate savings for equivalent quality in terms of HDR-VDP-2.